The Equinox (Volume I, Number VIII)

HIS SECRET SIN stoutly and even a little sternly rebuked him with the original remark: " To the pure all things are pure.“ It was knowing when to be bold that had made Theodore the fine business man he was. And very bold it was, for conscience makes cowards of us all. The secret shame of his orgies 1 Every week—night— once even on a Sunday l—after everyone had gone to bed, he opened the little safe in the wall at the head of his bed, and drew forth the obscene picture from its envelope marked “ In case of my death or disability THIS PACKET is to be DESTROYED UNOPENED. T. Bugg. ” Then he would sit, and hold it in his hot hands, and gloat upon the evil thing, lifting it now and again to his mouth to cover it with greedy, slobbering kisses And afterwards, when it was- safely locked up again, he would undress with a certain unction. Once even he attempted—with the aid of a bath towelwto take the pose before the mirror. And he saw nothing ridiculous in that, just as he saw nothing beautiful in the photograph, Nakedness is lust: so ran his simple gospel of aesthetics. Shame quickened him, too, to measures of expiation or precaution He read family prayers twice a day instead of once, and he took the chair at the Annual Meeting of a Society for Sending Out Trousers to Converted Hindoos. As everybody in the Midlands knows, “ Hindoos" are Naked Savages. And he discharged a groom for whistling on Sunday. But if these expedients salved his conscience, they did nothing to quell Gertrude’s incipient tendency to independence 55