We rose to his challenge a little awkwardly and our first talk was clumsy, there were flushed faces and red ears, and I remember Hatherleigh broke out into a monologue on decency. “Modesty and Decency,” said Hatherleigh, “are Oriental vices. The Jews brought them to Europe. They’re Semitic, just like our monasticism here and the seclusion of women and mutilating the dead on a battlefield. And all that sort of thing.”
Hatherleigh’s mind progressed by huge leaps, leaps that were usually wildly inaccurate, and for a time we engaged hotly upon the topic of those alleged mutilations and the Semitic responsibility for decency. Hatherleigh tried hard to saddle the Semitic race with the less elegant war customs of the Soudan and the northwest frontier of India, and quoted Doughty, at that time a
