whether they remain in their 'stand' or not?"
"If you mean to ask whether I am a moral futilitarian, I am not. People of character take a stand in order to prevent obnoxious things from going on. If the obnoxious things continue to go on in spite of them, people of character are glad to be left behind, or even to be trampled underfoot, when that is the only way to make their protest effective."
"You speak like yourself, Cornelia," I said, "and no higher compliment is possible. Your image interests me. I seem to see an invading army with leveled spears, and you dauntlessly flinging yourself upon them. Opposition interests me as long as it is effective—as long as the opposing breast checks the leveled spears. Sniping from the housetop at the postman, after the revolution has actually taken place—in that, there is a kind of unpalatable futility. But how do you apply your figure to the duty of the critic in the face of current fiction?"
"I apply it in this way. You yourself have admitted that it would be very easy to make a list of popular writers who, however varied their art and method, have running through their work an insistent preoccupation with sex of quite a
