of avoiding the inevitable penalties which the earlier novelists inflicted upon sorrowful blue-eyed girls who stooped to folly: they don't, in fiction at least, so often have to abandon a baby (Adam Bede), or to lose their job (Esther Waters), or to be barred from marriage (Tess of the Durbervilles), or to suffer ostracism or exile (David Copperfield).
Fourthly, as in the use of cocktails and tobacco, the double standard is manifestly giving ground before a single standard, and that a masculine standard: see any novel of the literary and artistic "villages" of New York or Chicago—for example, those of Mr. Floyd Dell. In Meredith Nicholson's Broken Barriers, an extraordinary disclosure from the Indiana school, unchastity is almost blandly presented as, for a considerable group of young business women, something like the accepted avenue to social advancement and as a preliminary to a good marriage.
Fifthly, chastity, legal and spiritual, has for a dozen years been under fire in this country as a distinctive aspect of that "Puritanism" which, as we know, must be destroyed, root and branch, before we shall have any art, letters, or society that are really worth mention.
