“Harry turned pale.
“‘You look sick, old man,’ I said.
“‘I’m not feeling very well,’ said he, ‘and I think I shall excuse myself and go home.’
“There was danger of a scene, but he got away unharmed. By and by the lionhearted deacon came out of his room, asked severely for ‘young Delance,’ wandered through the crowd, answered indignantly a few inquiries about his health, and returned to his lair.
“I saw that the Deacon was mad. New New England had imprudently bumped into old New England, and it was too soon to estimate the damage.”
The Honorable Socrates Potter laughed as he filled his pipe, and resumed with an attitude of ease and comfort;
“I’m a bit of a Puritan myself, although I understood Harry better than did the Deacon. The young people have been captured by the frankness of the Latin races. They call it emancipation. Travel and the higher education have opened the storage vats of foreign degeneracy and piped them into our land. Certain young men who have been ‘finished’ abroad, where they filled their souls with Latin lewdness, have turned it into fiction and a source of profit. Women buy their books and rush through them, and only touch the low places. There they lie entranced, thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Vallombrosa. Like the women in the sack of Ismail, they sit them down and watch for the adultery to begin.
“The imagination of the old world seems to have gone wild––Oscar Wilde! How the Oscars have thriven there since the first of them went to jail!––a degenerate dynasty!––hiding the stench of spiritual rot with the perfume of faultless rhetoric, speaking 83 the unspeakable with the tongues of angels and of prophets! And mostly, my boy, they have thriven on the dollars of American women under the leadership of modern culture. And, you know, the maiden follows mama. She is an apologist of sublime lewdness, of emancipated human caninity. Now I am no prude. I can stand a fairly strong touch of human nature. I can even put up with a good deal of the frankness of the cat and dog. But the frankness of some modern authors makes me sorry that Adam was a common ancestor of theirs and mine. It’s a disgrace to Adam and the whole human brotherhood. We sons of the Puritans ought to get busy in the old cause. Noah had the good sense to keep the animals and the people apart, and that’s what we’ve always stood for.”