"The moral changes with the times, the place and the peoples. Art is as fixed as the gulf between itself and the ethical obligation is wide."
Juliette, with cheeks afire, rushed gallantly in, also as prearranged by Maud, she being scheduled to be off-hand, playful and staccato. She was to fling the proposition on at this point to one of the guests, having been instructed which one:
"If eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for being,"
said she gayly and insouciantly. "Isn't it so, er—Mr. Wingham?"
That very good-looking and well-set-up young clergyman across the circle next to Miss Boswell, started ever so slightly at this call upon him by name. He had been looking at Amanthus, lovely creature, who needed neither vocabulary nor repartee either, in her business of life!
"It is," he agreed a little hastily; then gathering himself smilingly together he said heartily, "It is eminently and conclusively its own excuse and justification."
This coming from Mr. Wingham was a bit dismaying, as from the nature of his cloth and calling, he had been counted on to take the moral issue up at this point. It brought matters to an unprepared-for pause.
"The Puritan—" hurriedly began conscientious Adele, but with a glance at Maud, stopped. The Puritan, as taken from "Prepared Debates," was to follow in logical sequence after the support and exposition of the moral by Mr. Wingham. Adele swallowed, and withdrew.
Whereupon support for the moral came from the other side of the circle, from Culpepper nobly and by no sort of prearrangement either. One could wish he would show more conviction and less jocularity about it, however. The progenitors of this evening's business were of no mind by now to be played with. Two of the friends of Culpepper, also, Mr. Welling and Mr. Cannon, would bear looking after. Their markedly polite attention almost would seem to cover ecstacy and enjoyment.
"In the ideals of that great old people, the Greeks," queried Culpepper jocularly, "somehow I seem to recall that the symmetry of the human body was the expression of the symmetry of the inner soul?"