"Why do you swear so?" inquired Ainsworth. "Don't you think it in execrable taste?"
"Taste?" laughed Bently. "Yes; it's so far above all taste as to be a—sight higher and bigger."
"I make a distinction," Herman put in good naturedly, "between swearing and blasphemy; and Tom never blasphemes. His cursing is all in the interest of the highest virtues."
"Profanity is like smoking," added Tom. "Every thing depends upon how you do it. The English, for instance, smoke for the brutality of the thing; they never have any of the French finesse, and their smoking is nothing less than a crime. But as the Arabs smoke it is one of the loftiest virtues; there's something godlike about it.
"It is from smoking," Fenton chimed in, "that the Orientals learned how to treat women; for a woman is like tobacco, the aroma should be enjoyed and the ashes thrown away."
"By George!" exclaimed one of the Pagans, moved by some rare compunction to remember that he had a wife at home, "that's infamous, Arthur."
"It is my belief," observed Ainsworth deliberately, "that Fenton lies awake nights to invent beastly things to say about women, and when he gets something that he thinks is smart he throws it into the conversation any where, without the slightest regard to whether it fits or not."
"What makes you so bitter against women?" asked Bently.
"Yes," added Rangely, with mock deprecation. "Why do you want to annihilate the sex? What harm have women ever done to you?"
"Oh," retorted the artist, "it is on theoretical principles, purely. I adore that masculine ideal which man calls woman, but only finds in his brain. The highest on earth is reached only by the absolute elimination of the feminine. Ah! man is at his best in war," he went on, his attitude becoming less studied and more forcible, as he allowed his intellectual interest to overpower his vanity; "there he is all masculine; man without the limitations that the presence of woman imposes upon him. There woman is ignored, and even if she has been the cause of the war—and to be the cause of war is woman's noblest prerogative!—she is for the time being as completely forgotten as if she had never existed. She slips into oblivion as does the horn of grog which gives his courage."