"Hugh, I wish I was altogether different," she said. "I wish I was like one of those simple girls whom you never by any chance meet outside the covers of six-shilling novels. They are quite human, only no human girl was ever like them. They like music and food and sentiment and sea-bathing and playing foolish games, just as we all do. But there is nobody behind them: they are tastes without character. If only one's character was nothing more than the sum total of one's tastes, how extraordinarily simple it would all be. We should spend our lives in making ourselves pleasant and enjoying ourselves. But there is something that sits behind all our tastes, and though those tastes express it, they do not express it all, nor do they express its essence. I am something beyond and back of the things I like, and the people I like. Something inside me says 'I want: I want.' I daresay it wants the moon, and has as much chance of getting it as I have of reaching up into the sky and pulling it down. Oh, Hugh, I want the moon, and what will the moon be like? Will it be hard and cold or soft and warm? I don't care. I shall slip it between my breasts and hold it close."
She paused a moment opposite him.
"Am I talking damned rot?" she asked. "I daresay I am. I am a rotter then, because all I say is me. Another thing, too: morally, I am not in the least worthy of you. I don't know any one who is. I don't really, and I'm not flattering you, because I don't rate the moral qualities very high. They are compatible with such low organizations. Earwigs, I read the other day, are excellent mothers. How that seems to alter one's conception of the beauty of the maternal instinct! It does not alter my conception of earwigs in the least, and I shall continue to kill any excellent mothers that I find in my room."
Hugh laughed suddenly and uproariously and then became perfectly grave again.
"Your moral organization is probably extremely low," he said. "But I settled long ago to overlook that."
"Ah, there we are again," said Nadine. "You deliberately propose to misconceive me, with the kindest intentions I know, but with how wrong a principle. You shut your eyes to me, as if—as if I was a smut! You settle to overlook the fact that I have no real moral perception. Could you settle to overlook the fact if I had no nose and only one tooth? I assure you the lack of a moral nature is a more serious defect. But, poor devil that I am, how was I to get one? We were talking about heredity before you came in—"
Nadine paused a moment.
"As a matter of fact," she said, "I was telling them that there was no truth in heredity. We will now take the other side of the question. How was I, considering my family, to have moral perceptions?"
"Are you being quite consistent?" asked Hugh.
"Why should I be consistent? Who is consistent except those simple people whom you buy so many of for six shillings, and they are consistently tiresome. How, I said, was I to have got moral perception? There is Daddy! If I was a doctor I would certify any one to be insane who said Daddy was a moral organism. There is darling Mama! I would horse-whip any one who said the same of her, for his gross stupidity and insolence. The result is me; I am more pagan than Heliogabalus. I do not think that anything is right or that anything is wrong. I want the moon, but I am afraid you are not the man in it."