But they keep right on being cheated right and left; thank heaven, they will never learn to be wiser!

This difference between the Village view and the conventional standpoint is very difficult to analyse.  It really can only be made clear by examples.  As, for instance: 

It is fairly late in the evening.  In one of the little tea shops is a group of girls and men smoking.  To them enters a youth, who is hailed with “How is Dickey’s neuralgia?”

The newcomer grins and answers:  “Better, I guess.  He’s had six drinks, and is now asleep upstairs on Eleanore’s couch.  He’ll be all right when he wakes up.”

They laugh, but quite sympathetically, and the subject is dismissed.

Now, there is a noteworthy point in this trifling episode, though it may appear a trifle obscure at first.  There is, to be sure, nothing especially interesting or edifying in the fact of a young man’s drinking himself into insensibility to dull a faceache; the thing has been known before.  Neither is it an unheard-of occurrence for a friendly and charitably inclined woman to grant him harbour room till he has slept it off.  The only striking point about this is that it is taken so entirely as a matter of course by the Villagers.  It no more astonishes them that Eleanore should give up her couch to a male acquaintance for an indefinite number of night hours, than that she should give him a cup of tea.  It is entirely the proper, kindly thing to do; if Eleanore had not done it, she would not be a Villager, and the Village would have none of her.

[Illustration:  MACDOUGAL ALLEY.]

It may be further remarked that, if you should go upstairs to Eleanore’s studio, you would find that she takes the presence on the couch as calmly as though it were a bundle of laundry.  She is in no sense disconcerted by the occasional snore that wakes the midnight echoes.  She works peacefully on at the black-and-white poster which she is going to submit tomorrow.  She does not resent Dickey at all.  Neither does she watch his slumbers tenderly nor hover over him in the approved manner.  Eleanore is not the least bit sentimental,—­few Villagers are.  They are merely romantic and kindly, which are different and sturdier graces.

Toward morning Dickey will wake and Eleanore will make him black coffee and send him home.  And there will be the end of that.

Conceive such a situation on the outside!  Imagine the feminine flutter of the conventional Julia.  Fancy, above all, the hungry gossip of conventional Julia’s conventional friends!  But in the Village there is very little scandal, and practically no slander.  They are very slow to think evil.

And this in spite of their rather ridiculous way of talking.  They do, a number of them, give the uninitiated an impression of moral laxity.  Their phrases, “the free relation,” “the rights of sex,” “suppressed desires,” “love without bonds,” “liberty of the individual” do, when jumbled up sufficiently, make a composite picture of strange and lurid aspect.  But actually, they are not one atom less moral than any other group of human beings,—­in fact, thanks to their unquestionable ideals and their habit of fearless thinking, they are, I think, a good bit more so.