'...Men and women - especially women - had been judged too much by their capacity for love. This was because people who love, propagate, thought Varvara, and transmit their vulgar standard of love from generation to generation. Just as rabbits transmit their bobtails. Bobtails are a conventional rabbit standard. A rabbit with a long curly tail would be feared, shunned, trampled to death, so the innovation would die untried, unbequeathed, abortive. But its death didn't prove the essential wrongness of long curly tails for rabbits. Genius was probably often heartless. But genius did not often propagate. Strangeness meant physical mortality, so strangeness was rare - never re-born - always new in every manifestation. All the stupid things - cruelty - prostitution - womanly modesty - conventional religion - conventional morality - only survived so rampantly because of the excessive fertility of the stupid.'
from Tobit Transplanted by Stella Benson (Chapter VII)
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