Wickedness in high places is so much more appetizing than wickedness in low; it enables us to prove that those who are inconsiderate enough to rise above us in place and power, only do so at the cost of falling below us in simplicity and virtue. The public lips have recently been smacking over the details of a case in which it was alleged that a wife endeavoured to advance the career of her husband by a liaison with the Quarter Master General of H.M. Forces. It was further alleged that the husband condoned and even encouraged her conduct. The Quarter Master General was a man of marked ability. His organizing and administrative capacity were justly famous; he was, in fact, one of the few brilliant successes of the War. When the rumour spread that this man, one of the most powerful as well as the ablest in the land, had been willing to advance a subordinate because he desired his wife, the outburst of public indignation in the press was tremendous. Wickedness in high places was a glorious theme: there had been nothing like it since the Armistice. Labour bodies met to insist on the superior purity of the lives of working-people, and parsons thundered in their pulpits against the luxury of the rich. For several weeks the Dennistoun case was the chief subject of conversation in trains, ’buses, and bar-parlours, and those whose lips smacked the most greedily over the luscious scandal were the most severe in their condemnation of the vices of society. Why was it that this case attracted so much attention? Why was the wickedness involved considered so shocking? Why did those who would not have looked twice at the six-line paragraph describing a similar occurrence in the remoter suburbs, follow every detail of the case with the most avid curiosity? Because the woman was unusually beautiful, the man unusually powerful and talented. The beauty of the woman aroused the envy of other women; the power and talents of the man excited the envy of other men. We all of us have an impulse to blame those whom life has more generously gifted or more fortunately bestowed than ourselves. We make a virtue of our deficiencies, argue that only the dull and lowly are good, and call the feeling of envy which we experience for those who are neither dull nor lowly moral indignation.