But Crocker had suddenly ceased to snore; his head had fallen so that a peculiar whistling arose instead.  Both Shelton and the parson looked at him, and the sight sobered them.

“Your friend seems very tired,” said the parson.

Shelton forgot all his annoyance, for his host seemed suddenly pathetic, with those baggy garments, hollow cheeks, and the slightly reddened nose that comes from not imbibing quite enough.  A kind fellow, after all!

The kind fellow rose, and, putting his hands behind his back, placed himself before the blackening fire.  Whole centuries of authority stood behind him.  It was an accident that the mantelpiece was chipped and rusty, the fire-irons bent and worn, his linen frayed about the cuffs.

“I don’t wish to dictate,” said he, “but where it seems to me that you are wholly wrong in that your ideas foster in women those lax views of the family life that are so prevalent in Society nowadays.”

Thoughts of Antonia with her candid eyes, the touch of freckling on her pink-white skin, the fair hair gathered back, sprang up in Shelton, and that word—­“lax” seemed ridiculous.  And the women he was wont to see dragging about the streets of London with two or three small children, Women bent beneath the weight of babies that they could not leave, women going to work with babies still unborn, anaemic-looking women, impecunious mothers in his own class, with twelve or fourteen children, all the victims of the sanctity of marriage, and again the word “lax” seemed to be ridiculous.

“We are not put into the world to exercise our wits,”—­muttered Shelton.

“Our wanton wills,” the parson said severely.

“That, sir, may have been all right for the last generation, the country is more crowded now.  I can’t see why we should n’t decide it for ourselves.”

“Such a view of morality,” said the parson, looking down at Crocker with a ghostly smile, “to me is unintelligible.”

Cracker’s whistling grew in tone and in variety.

“What I hate,” said Shelton, “is the way we men decide what women are to bear, and then call them immoral, decadent, or what you will, if they don’t fall in with our views.”

“Mr. Shelton,” said the parson, “I think we may safely leave it in the hands of God.”

Shelton was silent.

“The questions of morality,” said the parson promptly, “have always lain through God in the hands of men, not women.  We are the reasonable sex.”

Shelton stubbornly replied

“We ’re certainly the greater humbugs, if that ’s the same.”

“This is too bad,” exclaimed the parson with some heat.

“I ’m sorry, sir; but how can you expect women nowadays to have the same views as our grandmothers?  We men, by our commercial enterprise, have brought about a different state of things; yet, for the sake of our own comfort, we try to keep women where they were.  It’s always those men who are most keen about their comfort”—­and in his heat the sarcasm of using the word “comfort” in that room was lost on him—­“who are so ready to accuse women of deserting the old morality.”