Page:Counter-currents, Agnes Repplier, 1916.djvu/172

Counter-Currents conversation, were it not for the morbid sensibility which has undermined our judgment, and set our nerves a-quivering. Even a counsellor so sane and so experienced as the Reverend Honourable Edward Lyttelton, Headmaster of Eton, who has written an admirable volume on "Training of the Young in Laws of Sex," drops his tone of wholesome austerity as soon as he turns from the safeguarding of lads to the pensive consideration of women. Boys and men he esteems to be captains of their souls, but the woman is adrift on the sea of life. He does not urge her to restraint; he pleads for her to the masters of her fate. "The unhappy partners of a rich man's lust," he writes, "are beings born with the mighty power to love, and are endowed with deep and tender instincts of loyalty and motherhood. When these divine and lovely graces of character are utterly shattered and foully degraded, the man, on whom all the treasure has 156