"How can you say so," protested Mrs. Kip, "when, as a family, you are so musical?" Then, summoning to her eyes an expression of great intelligence, she added: "And I should know that you were, all of you, from your thick eyebrows and very thick hair. You have heard of that theory, haven't you, Mr. Willoughby? That all true musicians have very thick hair?"
"Also murderers; I mean the women—the murderesses," remarked Dolly.
"Oh, Dolly, what ideas you do have! Who would ever think of associating murderesses with music? Music is so uplifting," protested the rosy widow.
"We should take care that it is not too much so," Dolly answered. "Lots of us are ridiculously uplifted. We know one thing perhaps, and like it. But we remain flatly ignorant about almost everything else. In a busy world this would do no harm, if we could only be conscious of it. But no; on we go, deeply conceited about the one thing we know and like, and loftily severe as to the ignorance of other persons concerning it. It doesn't occur to us that upon other subjects save our own, we ourselves are presenting precisely the same spectacle. A Beethoven, when it comes to pictures, may find something very taking in a daub representing a plump child with a skipping-rope, and the legend: 'See me jump!' A painter of the highest power may think 'The Sweet By-and-By' on the cornet the acme of musical expression. A distinguished sculptor may appreciate on the stage only negro minstrels or a tenth-rate farce. A great historian may see nothing to choose, in the way of beauty, between a fine etching and a chromo. It is well known that the most celebrated, and deservedly celebrated, scientific man of our day devours regularly the weakest fiction that we have. And people who love the best classical music and can endure nothing else, have no idea, very often, whether they belong to the mammalia or the crustacea, or whether the Cologne cathedral is Doric or late Tudor."
"Carry it a little further, Miss Franklin," said Walter Willoughby; "it has often been noted that criminals delight in the most sentimental tales."
"That isn't the same thing," Dolly answered. "However, to take up your idea, Mr. Willoughby, it is certainly true that it is often the good women who read with the most breathless interest the newspaper reports of crimes."
"Oh no!" exclaimed Mrs. Kip.
"Yes, they do, Lilian," Dolly responded. "And when it comes to tales, they like dreadful events, with plenty of moral reflections thrown in; the moral reflections make it all right. A plain narrative of an even much less degree of evil, given impartially, and without a word of comment by the author—that seems to them the unpardonable thing."
"Well, and isn't it?" said Mrs. Kip. "Shouldn't people be taught—counselled?"
"And it's for the sake of the counsel that they read such stories?" inquired Dolly.