"I suppose, then, that you believe in woman's rights," I at length haphazarded an interruption.
"Yes," answered Keidansky, "I believe that women should have all their rights, and should not, as the French cynic would have it, be killed at forty. It's too late. I mean," he added quickly, "that it's too late to talk any more about it."
IX The Value of Ignorance
"What do I know? I don't know anything," said Keidansky, "and I don't care to."
"I thought you were always in quest of knowledge," I remarked.
"I am," he answered: "I am infatuated with the quest, I love it. It is so exhilarating, stirring, full of excitement and fraught with danger."
"Danger? Wherein is that?" I asked.
"The danger," he emphasized, "is in finding the knowledge I am in quest of; for once your search has been answered with success, and you have informed yourself with the facts of the case, the game is up and the fun is over, as the Americans say. The hallucination of the glorious quest is shattered, the suspense is spoiled, the ecstatic expectations are destroyed, and we become fit subjects for illustrations in the Fliegende Blätter. 'A little knowledge is a dangerous thing' and a lot of it is fatal. Yes, knowledge is might, but illusion is omnipotence. So I like to seek information well enough, but I would rather not know."