“You might have been caught, and that would have meant endless trouble. You might have incurred all sorts of consequences. What did you know about her?... We have wasted four days in that hot close place. When we found that League of Social Service we were talking about,” he said with a determined eye upon me, “chastity will be first among the virtues prescribed.”
“I shall form a rival league,” I said a little damped. “I'm hanged if I give up a single desire in me until I know why.”
He lifted his chin and stared before him through his glasses at nothing. “There are some things,” he said, “that a man who means to work—to do great public services—MUST turn his back upon. I'm not discussing the rights or wrongs of this sort of thing. It happens to be the conditions we work under. It will probably always be so. If you want to experiment in that way, if you want even to discuss it,—out you go from political life. You must know that's so.... You're a strange man, Remington, with a kind of kink in you. You've a sort of force. You might happen to do immense things.... Only—”
He stopped. He had said all that he had forced himself to say.
“I mean to take myself as I am,” I said. “I'm going to get experience for humanity out of all my talents—and bury nothing.”
Willersley twisted his face to its humorous expression. “I doubt if sexual proclivities,” he said drily, “come within the scope of the parable.”
I let that go for a little while. Then I broke out. “Sex!” said I, “is a fundamental thing in life. We went through all this at Trinity. I'm going to look at it, experience it, think about it—and get it square with the rest of life. Career and Politics must take their chances of that. It's part of the general English slackness that they won't look this in the face. Gods! what a muffled time we're coming out of! Sex means breeding, and breeding is a necessary function in a nation. The Romans broke up upon that. The Americans fade out amidst their successes. Eugenics—”
“THAT wasn't Eugenics,” said Willersley.
“It was a woman,” I said after a little interval, feeling oddly that I had failed altogether to answer him, and yet had a strong dumb case against him.