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She shall see thee with thy good weapon in thy hand, and with villain's blood on thy fingers, that she may know what is the value of a true man's service. She has stopped my mouth overlong with her pruderies and her scruples. I will have her know what a brave man's love is worth, and a bold burgess's to boot."

Damaris kindled, standing before him, flamed indeed to a rare carelessness of convention, of enjoined pruderies and secrecies. "You gave him the beautiful gift of life to begin with; and saved his life later when he was so miserably tempted to end it. As he loves life, where then is the debt? Not on your side certainly, dearest."

At length came that time when physicians could define within a few days the final hour of release. And latterly the mocking pruderies of rank had been laid aside, and Maltravers had, for some hours at least in the day, taken his watch beside the couch to which the admired and brilliant Florence Lascelles was now almost constantly reduced. But her high and heroic spirit was with her to the last.

He disliked the way she walked, and the way she sat down, the way she spread her skirts or gathered them, the way she carried her body and turned her head, the way her black eyes provoked a stare and then resented it, her changes of posture under observation, the perpetual movement of her hands that were always settling and resettling her hat, her hair, her veil; all the blushings and bridlings, the pruderies and impertinences of the pretty woman of her class, he disliked them all.

It depends, to some extent, though fortunately not entirely, on the judgment of those in authority over the young soul whether the literature to which the youth or girl is admitted is or is not of the large and humanizing order. All great literature touches nakedly and sanely on the central facts of sex. It is always consoling to remember this in an age of petty pruderies.

It is very difficult to deceive her logically, and it is impossible to disarm her emotionally. Her revolt against the pruderies and sentimentalities of the world was evidence, to begin with, of her intellectual enterprise and courage, and her success as a rebel is proof of her extraordinary pertinacity, resourcefulness and acumen.

Her pruderies and her abandonments of prudery afforded between them an atmosphere as unwholesome as it was easily possible for a man of fervent temperament to live in. Work of the hard and healthful sort was practically abandoned.

At one end of the scale we observe the suffragette, with her grotesque adoption of the male belief in laws, phrases and talismans, and her hysterical demand for a sexual libertarianism that she could not put to use if she had it. And at the other end we find the snuffling and neurotic woman, with her bogus martyrdom, her extravagant pruderies and her pathological delusions.

But even its frank acceptance, as of divine origin, of sexual rules so unlike those that are nominally our own, such as polygamy and concubinage, helps to enlarge the vision of the youthful mind by showing that the rules surrounding the child are not those everywhere and always valid, while the nakedness and realism of the Bible cannot but be a wholesome and tonic corrective to conventional pruderies.

Before they depart for the evening he escorts her to the huge sign, "Für Damen," and waits patiently while she goes in and fixes her mussed hair. The Bavarians have no false pruderies, no nasty little nicenesses. There is, indeed, no race in Europe more innocent, more frank, more clean-minded.