together, carried the point against him. He quoted Cato and Roman law and the monasteries of Thibet.
“Well, anyway,” said Hatherleigh, escaping from our hands like an intellectual frog, “Semitic or not, I've got no use for decency.”
We argued points and Hatherleigh professed an unusually balanced and tolerating attitude. > “I don't mind a certain refinement and dignity,” he admitted generously. “What I object to is this spreading out of decency until it darkens the whole sky, until it makes a man's father afraid to speak of the most important things, until it makes a man afraid to look a frank book in the face or think—even think! until it leads to our coming to—to the business at last with nothing but a few prohibitions, a few hints, a lot of dirty jokes and, and “—he waved a hand and seemed to seek and catch his image in the air—“oh, a confounded buttered slide of sentiment,