Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/48

 whole troop of damsels who meander where they will in quest of rosebuds. Here is Robert Herrick's Lilla deliberately and successfully discarding marriage for an unsanctioned union. Here is Margaret Prescott Montague's Julie (in Deep Channel) finding in an illicit relationship the effective key to a larger and more spiritual life. Here is even Mrs. Gerould permitting a grave and thoughtful illegal relationship to the hero of Conquistador, whom she would apparently have us regard as the very pink of essential purity. No single explanation will account for the community in "destructive" tendency discernible in the latest phase of the movement; or for the fact that there is hardly one in a dozen recent novels which Cornelia would care to see in the hands of her daughter; or for the more alarming fact that, if there were one such novel in a dozen, Cornelia's daughter probably would not care to read it.

Since, in the United States, marriage has been by no means a legally irretrievable disaster, it would be absurd to point to the rigor of our law as a very important occasion of the widespread indifference or disrespect for chastity exhibited or reflected by many American writers. The occasions of our revolt lie deeper than that, and many