Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/67

 gant and sacrificial adoration of an ideal, our youth exalted the cleanness and hardness of athletic games, and religiously subjected themselves to the rules and rigor of the game—to that arbitrary, elaborate, inflexible, yet self-imposed system of ethics which alone makes any good game possible. I am hoping that our children's generation will contain more real sportsmen than ours did—fewer quitters, fewer squealers, fewer players crying out to have the rules changed after the game is on; and no one so silly as to suppose there can be a game without rules."

"That hope is rather remote, isn't it?"

"Rather. I have another, more immediate. I hope that in the early stages of the counter-revolution our sophisticated sons and daughters will scrutinize 'the idea of sex,' coolly extract from it the part that belongs to physiology and pathology; and then disuse the word as synonym for every other element in the complex human relationship which sometimes makes human beings paradisiacally happy in their blossoming season and content enough with each other even into wintry old age. I have some hope that the Emetic School may help our children to understand that sex and sexual self-realization are not, in