The Secret Places of the Heart by H. G. Wells Page B

chair, frowning judicially with the fingers
of one hand apposed to the fingers of the other. "He makes me bristle
because all his life and ideas challenge my way of living. But if I
eliminate the personal element?"
    He pulled a sheet of note-paper towards him and began to jot down notes
with a silver-cased pencil. Soon he discontinued writing and sat tapping
his pencil-case on the table. "The amazing selfishness of his attitude!
I do not think that once—not once—has he judged any woman except as
a contributor to his energy and peace of mind.... Except in the case of
his wife....
    "For her his habit of respect was formed before his ideas developed....
    "That I think explains HER....
    "What was his phrase about the unfortunate young woman with the
carbuncle?... 'Totally Useless and unnecessary illness,' was it?...
    "Now has a man any right by any standards to use women as this man has
used them?
    "By any standards?"
    The doctor frowned and nodded his head slowly with the corners of his
mouth drawn in.
    For some years now an intellectual reverie had been playing an
increasing part in the good doctor's life. He was writing this book of
his, writing it very deliberately and laboriously, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF A
NEW AGE, but much more was he dreaming and thinking about this book.
Its publication was to mark an epoch in human thought and human affairs
generally, and create a considerable flutter of astonishment in the
doctor's own little world. It was to bring home to people some various
aspects of one very startling proposition: that human society had
arrived at a phase when the complete restatement of its fundamental
ideas had become urgently necessary, a phase when the slow, inadequate,
partial adjustments to two centuries of changing conditions had to give
place to a rapid reconstruction of new fundamental ideas. And it was
a fact of great value in the drama of these secret dreams that the
directive force towards this fundamentally reconstructed world should be
the pen of an unassuming Harley Street physician, hitherto not suspected
of any great excesses of enterprise.
    The written portions of this book were already in a highly polished
state. They combined a limitless freedom of proposal with a smooth
urbanity of manner, a tacit denial that the thoughts of one intelligent
being could possibly be shocking to another. Upon this the doctor was
very insistent. Conduct, he held, could never be sufficiently discreet,
thought could never be sufficiently free. As a citizen, one had to treat
a law or an institution as a thing as rigidly right as a natural law.
That the social well-being demands. But as a scientific man, in one's
stated thoughts and in public discussion, the case was altogether
different. There was no offence in any possible hypothesis or in the
contemplation of any possibility. Just as when one played a game one was
bound to play in unquestioning obedience to the laws and spirit of the
game, but if one was not playing that game then there was no reason why
one should not contemplate the completest reversal of all its methods
and the alteration and abandonment of every rule. Correctness of
conduct, the doctor held, was an imperative concomitant of all really
free thinking. Revolutionary speculation is one of those things that
must be divorced absolutely from revolutionary conduct. It was to the
neglect of these obvious principles, as the doctor considered them, that
the general muddle in contemporary marital affairs was very largely due.
We left divorce-law revision to exposed adulterers and marriage reform
to hot adolescents and craving spinsters driven by the furies
within them to assertions that established nothing and to practical
demonstrations that only left everybody thoroughly uncomfortable. Far
better to leave all these matters to calm, patient men in easy chairs,
weighing typical cases impartially, ready to condone, indisposed to
envy.
    In return for which restraint on the part of the eager and adventurous,
the