Alan Merrick strode from his father's door that day stung with a
burning sense of wrong and injustice. More than ever before in
his life he realized to himself the abject hollowness of that
conventional code which masquerades in our midst as a system of
morals. If he had continued to "live single" as we hypocritically
phrase it, and so helped by one unit to spread the festering social
canker of prostitution, on which as basis, like some mediaeval
castle on its foul dungeon vaults, the entire superstructure of our
outwardly decent modern society is reared, his father no doubt
would have shrugged his shoulders and blinked his cold eyes, and
commended the wise young man for abstaining from marriage till his
means could permit him to keep a wife of his own class in the way
she was accustomed to. The wretched victims of that vile system
might die unseen and unpitied in some hideous back slum, without
touching one chord of remorse or regret in Dr. Merrick's nature.
He was steeled against their suffering. Or again, if Alan had sold
his virility for gold to some rich heiress of his set, like Ethel
Waterton--had bartered his freedom to be her wedded paramour in a
loveless marriage, his father would not only have gladly
acquiesced, but would have congratulated his son on his luck and
his prudence. Yet, because Alan had chosen rather to form a
blameless union of pure affection with a woman who was in every way
his moral and mental superior, but in despite of the conventional
ban of society, Dr. Merrick had cast him off as an open reprobate.
And why? Simply because that union was unsanctioned by the
exponents of a law they despised, and unblessed by the priests of a
creed they rejected. Alan saw at once it is not the intrinsic
moral value of an act such people think about, but the light in
which it is regarded by a selfish society.