Unavoidably. The
widow-robbing deacon of fiction can't help being hypocritical. The
widows themselves demand it! They admire his unctuousness. And look at
me. Suppose I did dare to make love to--some exquisite married woman.
I wouldn't admit it to myself. I giggle with the most revolting
salaciousness over La Vie Parisienne, when I get hold of one in Chicago,
yet I shouldn't even try to hold your hand. I'm broken. It's the
historical Anglo-Saxon way of making life miserable. . . . Oh, my dear,
I haven't talked to anybody about myself and all our selves for years."
"Guy! Can't we do something with the town? Really?"
"No, we can't!" He disposed of it like a judge ruling out an improper
objection; returned to matters less uncomfortably energetic: "Curious.
Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her
grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the
devil just for pleasure--wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes.
Here in Gopher Prairie we've cleared the fields, and become soft, so
we make ourselves unhappy artificially, at great expense and exertion:
Methodists disliking Episcopalians, the man with the Hudson laughing at
the man with the flivver.
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