All jokes aside, Alfred didn't actually know how he felt about that. There were some aspects of tribal life that he had learned to love while he'd been living in the wilds, and there were other aspects (like their "barbaric" sexual habits) that he had only observed and never partaken in himself. He had always assumed that the way he'd been raised was better, and it hadn't been until he'd returned to England years later that he'd had the opportunity to question that assumption. When he'd returned to England and looked at everything with a new perspective, the whole system that they had in place surrounding love and marriage and sex and everything just seemed too rigid and stiff to have merit — but he wasn't sure he was really ready to come full circle and endorse its opposite, and maybe he never would be.

"Well," he pointed out, "Maybe you can afford not to be prudish when you live in a village that's never heard of syphilis."