ALONG the claims made for that ideal life lived in the imaginations of the good folk of the Edwardian age was its Purity. Most people were supposed to be more or less pure, and in the case of the autobiographical type this was stressed very aggressively. I remember being told, on our second day’s acquaintance on a liner, by a proud and happy mother, apropos¹ of a rather lumpish son of seventeen or eighteen who may or may not have been just out of earshot, “That boy is still as pure as the driven snow.” (I don’t think I saw his face.) But they kept up the make-believe so widely that mostly they did believe that the majority of the people about them who seemed to be leading pure lives were in fact leading pure lives. You have witnessed Mrs Tewler’s struggle to keep our hero pure. And here I recall my never to be sufficiently² lamented³ Mrs Humbelay and how she was saying something about forgetting one’s dreams and imaginations, when she so unhappily went under the threshold of audibility and was lost to us.

Those people who still seek and profess⁴ purity in our harder world must murder and banish⁵ memories to a wonderful extent. True that almost all animals forget sexual experiences very readily. That is understandable of animals, who have their transitory annual rutting, because otherwise the creatures would always be in a state of unseasonable excitement. But man is an unseasonable creature and he does not naturally forget so completely. Consider all our pastors⁶ and teachers, and particularly consider the case of Mr Myame, His passion for Purity, for the complete suppression of any thought of an approach to a sexual act, in himself and others, assumed an undeniable frightfulness⁷.

The English-speaking world has altered so rapidly that it is already difficult to believe that before the World War of 1914–18, The Times would rather have died of shame than have admitted such words as syphilis or venereal disease to the massive chastity of its columns, and that when that unforgettable heroine, Ettie

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