Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/64

 principle that virtue, in this connection, means to maintain permanent relations with one who is thoroughly agreeable to you begins to sound to my ears like orthodoxy, as does also the companion principle, that to maintain permanent relations with one who is thoroughly disagreeable to you is vice. And though I am not ready to subscribe to all the possible corollaries of these two positions, I seem to see, gradually emerging from them, a new and better idea of chastity—of clean relationships—which will make "nice" people not less but more fastidious in their intimacies, not less but more austere in yielding the citadel of body and spirit."

"Nothing will emerge from these principles," said Cornelia decisively, "without a rule—without a rule which Church and State can enforce upon people who are not nice. You have admitted that the Wells-Galsworthy test of successful marriage tends to be 'unworkable.' You admit that the word 'permanent' tends to drop out of the principle, and that then you have, instead of a substitute for law, a permission for anarchy. You even admit that the novelists already reflect a condition approaching anarchy. Don't you think, after all, it is about time to call a halt?"