“Well, but too innocent for a man, anyhow.”
“That would be an insult,” I declared laughingly.
“For I’m not innocent in the least. You’ll find we’re all men here, just as much as any men in the North you could pick out. South Carolina has never lacked sporting blood, sir. But in Newport—well, sir, we gentlemen down here, when we wish a certain atmosphere and all that, have always been accustomed to seek the demi-monde.”
“So it was with us until the women changed it.”
“The women, sir?” He was innocent!
“The ‘ladies,’ as you Southerners so chivalrously continue to style them. The rich new fashionable ladies became so desperate in their competition for men’s allegiance that they—well, some of them would, in the point of conversation, greatly scandalize the smart demi-monde.”
He nodded. “Yes. I heard men say things in drawing-rooms to ladies that a gentleman here would have been taken out and shot for. And don’t you agree with me, sir, that good taste itself should be a sort of religion? I don’t mean to say anything sacrilegious, but it seems to me that even if one has ceased to believe some parts of the Bible, even if one does not always obey the Ten Commandments, one is bound, not as a believer but as a gentleman, to remember the difference between grossness and refinement, between excess and restraint—that one can have and keep just as the pagan Greeks did, a moral elegance.”
He astonished me, this ardent, ideal, troubled boy; so innocent regarding the glaring facts of our new prosperity, so finely penetrating as to some of the mysteries of the soul. But he was of old Huguenot blood, and of careful and gentle upbringing; and it was delightful to find such a young man left upon our American soil untainted by the present fashionable idolatries.
“I bow to your creed of ‘moral elegance,’” I cried. “It never dies. It has outlasted all the mobs and all the religions.”
“They seemed to think,” he continued, pursuing his Newport train of thought, “that to prove you were a dead game sport you must behave like—behave like—”