His face turned crimson.
“I wasn’t,” he said, with an immense effort at self-control. “Quite the contrary. One doesn’t apply general remarks to—specific cases.”
“Oh, yes, one does indeed!” Miss Franklin insisted.
III
He went off quite in the wrong frame of mind to deliver his lecture. When he had taken a stealthy peep at his audience, he became actually nervous. The Moral Courage Club seemed to be made up almost entirely of women—rows and rows of earnest faces. It would be very unpleasant to wound and distress them, as his words were sure to do, especially as they had all contributed toward the fee he was to receive. For a minute he was almost tempted to soften some of his remarks, but his reformer’s ardor flamed up again, and he went out upon the platform bravely.
The sight of their feathers and furs and earrings helped him. After all, they were nothing but barbarians, who must be enlightened at any cost. He began. He told than, as kindly as possible, how selfish, how greedy, how uncivilized they were, how unpleasant they looked in their skins of dead animals and feathers of dead birds, with all their savage and unesthetic finery; how brutally they preyed upon man.[Pg 7]
“Marriage ruins a man,” he said. “It stifles his ambitions; it coarsens him, it debases him. It outrages his manly self-respect. He is debarred from wholesome and essential experiences. He is shamefully exploited. He is forced into hypocrisy and deceit. Partly from his native kindliness, partly from his woman-directed training, he never dares to tell the truth to the opposite sex.”
And so on, directly into those earnest faces, framed by all their barbaric plumes and furs and jewels. To his surprise and dismay, none of them changed, grew abashed or angry or stern. They were only interested, all of them.
They came up in a body when he had finished, and congratulated him.
“You are always so stimulating!” said one.