Captain Macedoine's Daughter Author:William McFee Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: pester the Almighty with his petitions. You know, they say domestic ties strengthen a man's personality, stimulate him to ambition. I have not noticed it. On the... more » contrary, it has often seemed to me that married men adopt the ethics of the jungle. Life for them is a case of the man and his mate against the world. The jungle reverberates with their cries of rage, jealousy, and amorous delight. What are literature and drama but the coordination of these elevated cat-calls?" "Oh, come!" murmured the Surgeon. "Well, isn't it?" demanded Mr. Spenlove. "What made this war so popular? Wasn't it simply because it supplied men who had been surfeited with love, with an almost forgotten inspiration? Hadn't we been bred for a generation on Love, beautiful Love, which laughed at locksmiths and made the world go round? And here came Hate to have a turn! I tell you, something had to happen or we should all have gone crazy. Captain Evans, with his exalted notions of domestic affection, was our ideal. We were becoming monsters of marital egotism. You remember that song on the halls: "What more can you want when you've got your wife and kids, And a nice little home of your own? "That was rapidly becoming the sum total of England's morality. All men were 'men without a country' and they didn't much care even if they were citizens of a mean city, so long as their own contemptible little hutch was secure. I rather think the war has dealt that doctrine an ugly blow." "Well, go on," said somebody. " You must remember that Jack and his Madeline didn't simply look down on the rest of the world as sordid worms who couldn't appreciate such a holy passion. They didn't think of us at all. We didn't exist. Nothing existed—for them—outside that microscopic domestic circle. Madeline had been brou...« less