"Now you, Mildred," she said, "you are an excellent case in point. Tell me why you find it worth while to do that. What object is served by your spending hours at your hair-dresser's? Can you find nothing better to do?"
"You don't know my hair-dresser. He is a small Frenchman with a lack-lustre eye, who sighs over the wickedness of the world. I sigh too; and we find sympathy in each other's eyes. Some day I shall ask him to dinner, and that will be disappointing. Besides, my hair is beginning to be neatly picked out with gray, and when your hair is gray it looks as if you were no longer young. Nor am I. I am thirty-six. But I have still a greedy appetite for pleasure, which is the only real test of youth. Therefore I cut my coat, or rather dye my hair, according to my essential age, and pay no attention to the utterly misleading measure of years."
"But what is the use of being young if it is only to be young?" asked Lady Alston.
"That is a question which you will not ask when you are thirty-six. Most delightful things are of no use whatever, and useful things are seldom delightful. Go on about the want of originality in the world."
"There is really nothing to say about it. It is there, a colossal fact. Nobody is serious—seriousness is considered the greatest of social crimes—and we drift along like thistle-down. We are vicious; we are idle. No one has any dignity or any manners, and there is no object under the sun, except perhaps the avoidance of physical pain, for which we would sacrifice our breakfast or dinner."
"There is no one under the sun," said Mildred, "for whom many of us would not sacrifice our reputations."
"But not our dinner. Oh, I know I am only really speaking of—well, of people you and I know best, among whom we choose to pass our time. There again you see our utter want of originality. We are bound hand and foot by conventions of our own making. Supposing I happened to go into the country for a fortnight, instead of grilling here in London, every one would say it was quite unheard of. And I have not got sufficient originality to go, although I do think that it is simply silly and absurd to live in a town in the summer."
"Every one would say a great deal more than that," remarked Mrs. Brereton.
"I know they would. They would wonder whom I had gone with, and they would speedily invent several people. I beg the pardon of the people among whom we live. They have one passion, and it is scandal; the more ill-natured the better."
"No; ill-nature has nothing to do with it," said Mrs. Brereton. "They have a passion for scandal, it is true. What else is there to talk about? I share it; in fact, I have a particularly large helping, but it is the subject-matter of scandal which really interests people. I don't see why you shouldn't call it the study of human nature. It is if you come to think of it."