All that was, of course, inconceivable to Sylvia. How curious was the contrast of her one experience in the matter of venereal disease. She told me how she had been instrumental in making a match between her friend, Harriet Atkinson and a young scion of an ancient and haughty family of Charleston, and how after the marriage her friend's health had begun to give way, until now she was an utter wreck, living alone in a dilapidated antebellum mansion, seeing no one but negro servants, and praying for death to relieve her of her misery.
"Of course, I don't really know," said Sylvia. "Perhaps it was this--this disease that you speak of. None of my people would tell me--I doubt if they really know themselves. It was just before my own wedding, so you can understand it had a painful effect upon me. It happened that I read something in a magazine, and I thought that--that possibly my fiancée--that someone ought to ask him, you understand--"
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."
"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?