Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/40

 works naturally disquiet Cornelia, and challenge her idea of chastity.

His works disquiet me, because I think the defect which his heroes and heroines find in their first marriage they will find also in their second, and their third, and their fourth; they will find that neither the second nor the third nor the fourth marriage is capable of sustaining indefinitely the sense of ecstasy which the tired business man experiences the first time he notices how pretty his stenographer is. Tedium is three fourths of life. Sensible men settle quietly down to endure it, sustained by their fortitude and their twenty-five per cent of creature comforts and incidentals. The others imagine that by Babbittian adventures they can change the proportions and get something better than tedium. There is nothing that is even "just as good." Thackeray knew this and admitted it. Mr. Wells hasn't admitted it. That constitutes one distinction between the author of The Newcomes and the author of The New Machiavelli.

Mr. Galsworthy told us in The Dark Flower about the quest of ecstasy, and in Saint's Progress he confessed something of the extraordinary disregard of legality in sexual relations on the