Page:The cream of the jest; a comedy of evasions (IA creamofjestcomed00caberich).pdf/89

 earlier mediæval tales. And there for a month or some six weeks, the matter rested.

Then one propitious morning an indignant gentlewoman in Brooklyn wrote to The New York Sphere a letter which was duly printed in that journal's widely circulated Sunday supplement, The Literary Masterpieces of This Week, to denounce the loathsome and depraved indecency of the nineteenth and twentieth chapters, in which—while treating of Sir Guiron's imprisonment in the Sacred Grove of Caer Idryn, and the worship accorded there to the sigil of Scoteia—Kennaston had touched upon some of the perverse refinements of antique sexual relations. The following week brought forth a full page of letters. Two of these, as Kennaston afterward learned, were contributed by the "publicity man" of the Baxon-Muir Company, and all arraigned obscenities which Kennaston could neither remember or on re-reading his book discover. Later in this journal, as in other newspapers, appeared still more denunciations. An up-to-the-minute bishop expostulated from the pulpit against the story's vi