Wheeler then spoke of the birth of Venus. He said many writers thought the story as late as that of Psyche, and the line of Hesiod relating to it an interpolation.
Margaret thought she should have suspected this if she had never heard it. The thought it expressed was too comprehensive to be in keeping with the remainder of her story.
Charles Wheeler would not accept the criticism, but went on to talk about the marriage of Venus with Mars, which had amazed Olympus.
Margaret said the Olympian Deities were like modern men, who talk to women forever about their softness and delicacy, until women imagine that the only good thing in man is a strong arm. The girl elopes with a red coat, and the indignant lords of creation wonder why she did not appreciate their modest merit and unobtrusive virtues. Poor Beauty weeps out the crimson stain upon her escutcheon in a long age of suffering.
A laugh followed this bright sally, and then somebody said that Venus once married Mercury.
Margaret declared that must be an interpolation, for there were no points of sympathy between the Goddess of beauty and the God of craft.
James Clarke did not know about that; he thought that the finish and completeness of the late robbery of Davis, Palmer, & Co. constituted a kind of beauty!
Margaret said that affair was altogether grand; she had never heard of anything so Greek as Williamson’s exclaiming, “Gentlemen! you will not deprive me of the implements of my trade?” She could not help respecting his impudence! The Greeks ought to be respected for developing every human faculty into deity. She thought lying, stealing, and so forth only excesses of a good faculty; and so did the Greeks, for in their mistaken way they had deified Mercury. The Spartans taught their children to steal, and the Greeks universally acknowledged that to cheat was honorable if it could be concealed.
I remembered the passage in the “Republic” where Polemarchus confesses that he had learned from Homer to admire Autolycus, grand sire of Ulysses, distinguished above all men for his thefts and oaths! Thrasymachus said that the unjust were both prudent and good, if they were able to commit injustice to perfection! Is the immortality of Autolycus the destiny of Williamson?