“We’re being a sort of spiritual Bolsheviki, I suppose, going through a transition period of confusion and lawlessness and wild thinking.... But, just as something better than the old Russian Empire with its czars and grand dukes and Siberias and its—its Rasputins—is bound to follow Bolsheviki-ism, so something better than the narrowness of the sewing-circles and the Pilgrims and the viciousness of blindly accepted conventions and codes.... This has turned into something bigger than a World War—it is turning into a Greater Reformation.... Not the reformation of a religion, but a reformation in the basic thought of the world—surely of America....”
“Whew!” exclaimed Kendall. “I follow you, I guess, but my feet are off the bottom ... and I can’t swim.”
“You can think, can’t you?” she said, a trifle tartly.
“I guess I feel more than I think,” he said.
“We all do.... We have to feel in order to think, and we have to feel in order to understand. Cold logic isn’t worth a snap of the fingers—really.... You’ve been getting something out of Paris, haven’t you? Feeling something? I think you get it there more than any place else.... I love Paris.”
“My mother wouldn’t love it,” he said, gravely.
“And you’re like her—sometimes—aren’t you?... But aren’t you growing more tolerant—more able to see the other person’s point of view?”
“I—hang it all!—I can’t get away from the notion that good is good and bad is bad.”
She shook her head. “But you are beginning to see that America hasn’t the right to legislate for the world, and to define what is good and what is evil.... I know you are.... Now don’t be shocked, please. I’m American, of course, and the American code is for me—until it is altered. Whatever I may think about it, still it is the code and accepted by the majority. That binds me to a degree.... But I can still believe we are narrow and prudish.... It doesn’t take much imagination to understand that eating pork may be a sin to an orthodox Jew. It is a sin because he believes it is a sin. It is no sin for you because you think it is nonsense.... When you get down to essentials, the thing that is a sin is doing a thing you think to be a sin. It isn’t the thing, but the thinking....”
“I suppose that’s it.”