This brings me again to Christian Science, which somehow hung over this whole tour, not so much as a religious irritant as a pleasant safeguard. It wasn’t religious or obtrusive at all. Franklin, as I have said, is inclined to believe that there is no evil, though he is perfectly willing to admit that the material appearances seem all against that assumption at times.
“It’s a curious thing,” he said to me and Speed, “but that makes the fifth blowout to occur in that particular wheel. All the trouble we have had this spring and summer has been in that particular corner of the wagon. I don’t understand it quite. It isn’t because we have been using poor tires on that wheel or any other. As a matter of fact I put a set of new Silvertown cord tires on the wheels last May. It’s just that particular wheel.”
He gazed meditatively at the serene hills around us, and I volunteered that it might be “just accident.” I could see by Franklin’s face that he considered it a lesion in the understanding of truth.
“It may be,” he said. “Still you’ll admit it’s a little curious.”
A little later on we ran on to a wonderful tableland, high up in the mountains, where were a lake, a golf course, a perfect macadam road, and interesting inns and cottages—quite like an ideal suburban section of a great city. As we neared a four corners or railway station center I spied there one of those peculiarly constructed wagons intended originally to haul hay, latterly to convey straw-ride parties around the country in mountain resorts—a diversion which seems never to lose its charm for the young. This one, or rather three, for there turned out to be three in a row, was surrounded by a great group of young girls, as I thought, all of them in short skirts and with a sort of gymnasium costume which seemed to indicate that they were going out to indulge in outdoor exercises.
As we drew nearer we discovered, however, to our astonishment, that a fair proportion were women over forty or fifty. It seemed more like a school with many monitors than a mountain outing.
Contemplating this very modern show of arms and legs, I felt that we had come a very long way from the puritanic views of the region in which I had been raised if an inland summer resort permitted this freedom of appearance. In my day the idea of any woman, young or old, save those under fourteen, permitting anything more than their shoe tip and ankles to be seen was not to be thought of. And here were mothers and spinsters of forty and fifty as freely garbed as any bather at a summer resort.
Speed and Franklin and myself were fascinated by the spectacle. There was a general store near at hand and Franklin went to buy some chocolate. Speed sat upright at his wheel and curled his mustachios. I leaned back and endeavored to pick out the most beautiful of the younger ones. It was a difficult task. There were many beauties.
By this spectacle we were led to discuss for a few moments whether sex—the tendency to greater freedom of relationship between men and women—was taking America or the world in an unsatisfactory direction. There had been so much talk on the subject of late in the newspapers and elsewhere that I could not resist sounding Franklin as to his views. “Are we getting better or worse?” I inquired.
“Oh, better,” he replied with the air of one who has given the matter a great deal of thought. “I cannot feel that there is any value in repression, or certainly very little. Life as it appeals to me is a flowering out, not a recession. If it is flowering it is becoming richer, fuller, freer. I can see no harm in those girls showing their legs or in peoples' bodies coming into greater and greater evidence. It seems to me it will make for a kind of natural innocence after a while. The mystery will be taken out of sex and only the natural magnetism left. I never see boys bathing naked in the water but what I wish we could all go naked if the climate would only permit.” And then he told me about a group of boys in Carmel whom he had once seen on a rainy day racing naked upon the backs of some horses about a field near their swimming hole, their white, rain-washed bodies under lowering clouds making them look like centaurs and fawns. Personally I follow life, or like to, with a hearty enthusiasm wherever it leads.