It fits me like a hair-shirt.
Of course there are temperaments, but why can't we formulate them
and exercise the elementary charity of recognizing that one man's
health in these matters is another man's death? Some want love and
gratification and some don't. There are people who want children
and people who don't want to be bothered by children but who are
full of vivid desires. There are people whose only happiness is
chastity, and women who would rather be courtesans than mothers.
Some of us would concentrate upon a single passion or a single idea;
others overflow with a miscellaneous--tenderness. Yes,--and you
smile! Why spit upon and insult a miscellaneous tenderness, Benham?
Why grin at it? Why try every one by the standards that suit
oneself? We're savages, Benham, shamefaced savages, still.
Shamefaced and persecuting.
"I was angry about sex by seventeen," he went on. "Every year I
live I grow angrier."
His voice rose to a squeal of indignation as he talked.
"Think," he said, "of the amount of thinking and feeling about sex
that is going on in Cambridge this morning.
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