"I don't know if it's customary for women to whistle now-a-days," said the old lady, for whistling, as Eva knew, was a safe draw, "but in my time it was thought most improper."
"Isn't there a French proverb—I daren't pronounce French before you—about 'we have changed all that?' That is a very silly proverb. It is the older generation who changed it themselves. They made their own system of life impossible. They reduced it to an absurdity."
The dowager, who spoke French with a fine Scotch accent, and knew it, finished buckling on, as it were, her greaves and cuirass, and presented arms.
"I confess I don't understand you. No doubt I am very stupid—I should like very much to know how we have reduced our life to an absurdity."
"I don't say the modern generation are not quite as absurd," said Eva, "but the difference is that they have not yet learned their absurdity. You see, the whole race of men, since b. c. 4004—that is the correct date, is it not?—have been devoting themselves to the construction of any theory of life which would hold water, and one by one they have been abandoned. The new theory, that nothing matters at all, has not yet been disproved, and considering that no theory hitherto has ever been permanent, it would be absurd to abandon this one till it is disproved in as convincing a manner as all its predecessors."
"I imagine that no previous age has ever sunk so deep in mere sensuous gratifications," said the dowager, lunging heavily.
"Ah, do you think so?" said Eva. "Of course, it is impertinent in me to try to argue the matter with you, as experience is the only safe guide in such matters, and you have experience of at least one more generation than I. But that seems to me altogether untrue. As we know from the Bible, desire shall fail, because it has been gratified to the utmost that human desire can conceive, I imagine. Well, I think desire has failed to a great extent. The men of your generation, for instance, and the generation before, drank so much port wine that this generation drink none. The daily three bottles that our grandfathers and great-grandfathers indulged in, has fulfilled the desire of port to the uttermost. No one gets drunk now. I don't think I ever saw a man drunk. They used to fall under the table, did they not? What a charming state of things! But it has at least produced a fastidiousness in us, which considers heavy drinking coarse and low.
"My father was a teetotaler, and so was my husband," said the old lady, rather wildly.
"I think that the habit of drinking in men," continued Eva, "is really the fault of the women; you, of course, are an instance in point. Your husband was a teetotaler—surely, through your influence. If the men of the last generation were vile, the women, I think, were viler still. What is the word? Oh! yes, vicarious. The men sinned vicariously for the women."
"It is easy to speak lightly of the virtues of your forefathers," remarked the dowager; "much easier than to practice them yourself."