‘Yes,’ said Lamia penitently; ‘I own this is better than the chink of five-franc pieces, the lavishly gilded ceilings, and the hungry faces fastened on the gyrations of a whirligig. Yet, the rooms are crowded, and we have the woods to ourselves. The perversity that governs the lives of so many of us is, I have often felt, a strong argument against Free Will; and never seemed it more so than here where, in the most enchanting spot I have as yet beheld, men and women are most artificial, and most intent on the ugliest of pursuits.’
Thereupon—for have you not remarked that the oldest subjects of discourse are precisely those which best preserve their freshness?—the conversation, in this mountain solitude, began to travel, if somewhat discursively, over trite ground, in the course of which Lamia rather ingeniously suggested that, as with every other human faculty, our will is partly free, in part under the sway of necessity. The discussion, if discussion it can be called, was confined to three of us; for the Poet remained a silent listener.
‘Have you nothing,’ said Veronica at length, ‘to contribute to our deliberations? Can you not give us any help in our perplexity?’
‘I almost think I can,’ he said, ‘but not by any formal dialectic. Yet is not a universal conviction, of which it is impossible for human beings to divest themselves, as convincing as the most logical demonstration? Once after listening, by no means for the first time, to the arguments you have yet again been urging, there came to me the following reflections:—
FREE WILL AND FATE
I
‘You ask me why I envy not
The Monarch on his throne.
It is that I myself have got
A Kingdom of my own: