Page:Ann Veronica, a modern love story.djvu/38

 "Lydia Languish, for example. Anyhow, they didn't run about so much."

"Yes. That's about the beginning. It's these damned novels.  All this torrent of misleading, spurious stuff that pours from the press.  These sham ideals and advanced notions.  Women who Dids, and all that kind of thing"

Ogilvy reflected. "This girl—she's really a very charming, frank person—had had her imagination fired, so she told me, by a school performance of Romeo and Juliet."

Mr. Stanley decided to treat that as irrelevant. "There ought to be a Censorship of Books. We want it badly at the present time.  Even with the Censorship of Plays there's hardly a decent thing to which a man can take his wife and daughters, a creeping taint of suggestion everywhere.  What would it be without that safeguard?"

Ogilvy pursued his own topic. "I'm inclined to think, Stanley, myself that as a matter of fact it was the expurgated Romeo and Juliet did the mischief. If our young person hadn't had the nurse part cut out, eh? She might have known more and done less.  I was curious about that.  All they left it was the moon and stars.  And the balcony and 'My Romeo!

"Shakespeare is altogether different from the modern stuff. Altogether different.  I'm not discussing Shakespeare.  I don't want to Bowdlerize Shakespeare.  I'm not that sort I quite agree.  But this modern miasma—"

Mr. Stanley took mustard savagely.

"Well, we won't go into Shakespeare," said Ogilvy "What interests me is that our young women nowadays