FLAMING
YOUTH
129
is a sin of ignorance and loose thinking, is upon the sanctified sisterhood. They have classified the Deity for Pat: God as a social arbiter. “The sisterhood are purists. Naturally. But purists _ only by negation. All the essential facts they dodge. True, there is a course in hygiene. It is conducted by a desiccated virgin who minces about the simple and noble facts of sex life as if she were afraid of getting her feet wet, and whose soul would shrivel within her could
she overhear the casual conversation of the girls whom she purports to instruct. All that side of knowledge and conjecture they absorb from outside contacts. A worse medium would be hard to conceive. From what Pat indicates of the tittle-tattle of ingénues’ luncheons, it would enlighten Rabelais and shock Pepys! And the current jokes between the girls and their boy associates of college age are chiefly innuendo and double entente based on sex. Pat cannot say ‘bed’ or ‘leg’ or ‘skin’ without an expectant self-consciousness. Some reechy sort of bedroom story has been lately going the rounds, the point
of which is involved in the words ‘nudge’ and ‘phone.’ Every time either word is used in Pat’s set, there are knowing looks and sniggers, and some nimble wit makes a quick turn of the context and gets his reward in more or less furtive laughter. It is not so much the moral side, it is the nauseous bad taste that sickens one. The mind decays in that atmosphere. Once Pat said to me: ‘Bobs, you and Mr. Scott are the only clean-minded men Iknow.?
Think of what that means, Mona!
The vicious-
ness of such an environment. Yet the youngsters themselves are not essentially vicious; not many of them. They are curious with the itchy curiosity of their explorative time of life, and they have no proper guidance,
The girls are worse off than the boys who do gain some
