“Ay,” would growl my Timon—“the fruits of incontinence.”
“I don’t see it,” I would cry. “I can’t see but that a knife and fork are in the right succession to a beak. We may use our fingers, you will say. Would you wish me, sir, to fondle my love with the same hands I tear my meat withal? No, you wouldn’t—except for the sake of argument,—and therefore I protest I am the truer child of that little liaison. Vive la Nature! say I; the Nature who is my mother, and the God who is my father. They have taught me between them to study, in studying myself, to make the gift of prettiness to my neighbours.”
“And I swear you are a dutiful child,” he would answer, with the readiness that made me love him.
“O, believe me, sir!” I would cry; “there is nothing artificial about the civilisation you have professed to renounce—as if that were responsible for your downfall. On its main lines it always makes for beauty”—
“Which is truth, I suppose,” he would interrupt with a sneer.
“Which is truth, as much as anything is,” I would reply. “Truth is only a cant word for what we don’t understand; and, if we could get to, there would be an end of all fun in the world.”
“O, upon my word, you are a very learned minx!” he would crow; but I would continue, not minding him—
“If we had to start again from the beginning, don’t tell me but that we should develop the very same conventions as now, or at least near ’em. Why, sir, not to lean our elbows on the table, for instance, while we sup our tea, isn’t a tyrannous edict of society. ’Tis a natural recognition of the unhandsome; a natural effort to qualify ourselves for the better company we all look to some day. Don’t we all feel that we are only rehearsing here for a greater piece? Well, for my part, I don’t want to be damned in it. But you—you cry, like a poor actor, ‘Leave me alone to my pipe and beer. I shall be all right on the night itself!’”
Then he would laugh bravo; and, pulling out his tobacco, silence me with a kiss.
But now—well, he had abdicated, and I ruled, that was the difference.