He mused a little.
"Could I have found my cow brewer's daughter, she would have been too virtuously middle class to have thought of such a thing. And if I take this American—well, the Americans are so new a nation they have still a moral sense. So I think I am pretty safe."
"Old nations are deficient in this quality, then?"
"Yes. Artificial things are more worn out, and they get back nearer to nature."
"But you would object to a 'friend'?"
"Considerably, until the succession was firmly secured. After that, I suppose, my Duchess might please herself. She probably would, too, without consulting me. You don't see the whole of your neighbors eating cake and remain content with your own monotonous bread-and-butter."
This appeared to be very true. He continued in a meditative way:
"Because a few what we call civilized nations have set up a standard of morality for themselves, that does not change the ways of human nature. What we call morality has no existence in the natural world."
"Why should the respectable middle-class brewer's daughter have so strong a sense of it, then?" I asked.
"Because propriety is their god from one generation to another. You can almost overcome nature with a god sometimes. Babykins has a theory that the food we eat makes a difference in the ways of our class, but I don't believe that. It is because we hunt and shoot and live lives of inclination, not compulsion, like the middle classes, and so we get back nearer to nature."