"Simply for the preservation of good order and decency. You must know that the pleasant vices of an elegant person are brutalities in the uncultured. The masses have no tact or delicacy, they do not comprehend shades, and refinements of morals and manners. They can understand exoteric but not esoteric philosophy. We have really two codes of laws." "I think it would be far better for the masses--whom you so highly respect!--" I said, "if you were to throw off your masks and stand out before them just as you are. Let moral anarchy come if it must, and the evil be consumed in its own flame; out of its ashes the ph[oe]nix always rises again, a nobler bird." "How picturesque!" she exclaimed; "do you know, I think your language must be rich in imagery. I should like to learn it." I did not like the flippancy of this speech, and made no reply. After a brief pause she added, "There is truth in what you say, a ball must strike hard before it can rebound. Society must be fearfully outraged before it turns upon the offender, if he be a person of consequence. But you cannot expect the offender to do his worst, to dash himself to pieces, in order that a better state of morals may be built upon his ruin. We have not yet risen to such sublimity of devotion and self-sacrifice. I think the fault and the remedy both, lie more with the good people,--the people who make a principle of moral conduct. They allow us to cajole them into silence, they wink at our misdeeds. They know what we are up to, but they conceal the knowledge,--heaven knows why!--as carefully as we do our vices. Contenting themselves with breaking out in general denunciations which nobody accepts as personal rebuke." This was such a familiar picture that for a moment I fancied myself upon the Earth again. And I thought, what a difficult position the good have to maintain everywhere, for having accepted the championship of a cause whose standards are the highest and best! We expect them to be wise, tender, strong, just, stern, merciful, charitable, unyielding, forgiving, sinless, fearless. "Elodia," I said presently, "you can hardly understand what a shock this--this conversation has been to me. I started out with saying that I had often tried to fancy what our civilization might have done for you. I see more clearly now. You are the victim of the harshest and cruelest assumption that has ever been upheld concerning woman,--that her nature is no finer, holier than man's. I have reverenced womanhood all my life as the highest and purest thing under heaven, and I will, I must, hold fast to that faith, to that rock on which the best traditions of our Earth are founded." "Do your women realize what they have got to live up to?" she asked ironically. "There are things in men which offset their virtues," I returned, in justice to my own sex. "Where men are strong, women are gentle, where women are faithful, men are brave, and so on."