She stopped, and the blood was crimson in her cheeks, with the memory of her old excitement, and some fresh excitement added to it.  There are diseases of the mind as well as of the body, and one of them is called prudery.

“I can understand,” I said.  “It was certainly your right to be reassured on such a point.”

“Well, I tried to talk to my Aunt Varina about it; then I wrote to Uncle Basil, and asked him to write to Douglas.  At first he refused—­he only consented to do it when I threatened to go to my father.”

“What came of it in the end?”

“Why, my uncle wrote, and Douglas answered very kindly that he understood, and that it was all right—­I had nothing to fear.  I never expected to mention the incident to anyone again.”

“Lots of people have mentioned such things to me,” I responded, to reassure her.  Then after a pause:  “Tell me, how was it, if you didn’t know the meaning of marriage, how could you connect the disease with it?”

She answered, gazing with the wide-open, innocent eyes:  “I had no idea how people gave it to each other.  I thought maybe they got it by kissing.”

I thought to myself again:  The horror of this superstition of prudery!  Can one think of anything more destructive to life than the placing of a taboo upon such matters?  Here is the whole of the future at stake—­the health, the sanity, the very existence of the race.  And what fiend has been able to contrive it that we feel like criminals when we mention the subject?

23.  Our intimacy progressed, and the time came when Sylvia told me about her marriage.  She had accepted Douglas van Tuiver because she had lost Frank Shirley, and her heart was broken.  She could never imagine herself loving any other man; and not knowing exactly what marriage meant, it had been easier for her to think of her family, and to follow their guidance.  They had told her that love would come; Douglas had implored her to give him a chance to teach her to love him.  She had considered what she could do with his money—­both for her home-people and for those she spoke of vaguely as “the poor.”  But now she was making the discovery that she could not do very much for these “poor.”

“It isn’t that my husband is mean,” she said.  “On the contrary, the slightest hint will bring me any worldly thing I want.  I have homes in half a dozen parts of America—­I have carte blanche to open accounts in two hemispheres.  If any of my people need money I can get it; but if I want it for myself, he asks me what I’m doing with it—­and so I run into the stone-wall of his ideas.”

At first the colliding with this wall had merely pained and bewildered her.  But now the combination of Veblen and myself had helped her to realize what it meant.  Douglas van Tuiver spent his money upon a definite system:  whatever went to the maintaining of his social position, whatever added to the glory, prestige and power of the van Tuiver name—­that money was well-spent; while money spent to any other end was money wasted—­and this included all ideas and “causes.”  And when the master of the house knew that his money was being wasted, it troubled him.