Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/236

224 being by modern and secular movements from without. Culture and Socialism are transmuting everything, but, for Heaven's sake, let us have them at first hand. Spare us the noble army of tinkers.'

'But what does one gain by severing one's kinship with these people? Many of them have beautiful souls.'

'Now let us begin the praise of good-looking and devout women! Tell me that their timid and lovely twaddle had its inspiration. Take off your hat to their pure faith. It helps the world so immensely just now to go through life believing in Jack and the Beanstalk and the Seven Champions of Christendom. Kneel before their faithful purity. We all know that it means keeping game-preserves for the use of select parties, Mohammed's heaven on earth for the well-to-do gentlemen who are tired of adventures. A plentiful want of brains and a few lesser maladies in a chronic condition will conduct almost any man into the honeyed haunts of that dupery before he is forty. I am on the way there myself. But you are still a young man who dreams dreams and piques himself on being sincere.'

'Your bitterness,' said Wilson, 'carries you, as it seems to me, as far away from the truth as your indifference. For you generalise indiscriminately in both. No, Ned; talk like that will not go down.