“So you’ve learned some sauce. That’s new.”
“I’ve learned a good many things, father, and unlearned more.”
“Have you learned what a rotten hole the world is?”
“No. I like it too much to think ill of it.”
“Then you haven’t had a really bad time. I hoped you’d have a filthy time. You needed it badly, to let some of the gas out of you.”
“It’s been bad enough,” said René. “And there’s worse ahead. Are you living in London?”
“I’ve been here some time. It’s a dung-heap. I shall go over to Paris. I’d rather die there than anywhere. There is French blood in us, I believe, and I never could stomach the English and their hypocritical ways. What did they say of Gladstone? ‘Plays with the ace up his sleeve, and pretends God put it there.’ That’s the English way. I like blackguards. I’m a blackguard myself, but I think God ought to be kept out of it. . . . You’re looking fit.”
“I’m fit enough. George told me you’d left. I’d like to know why. I don’t want to open old scores or inquire into your private affairs, but it seemed to me that my mother was very good to you when you came back.”
“Well—— It was the same old trouble. Religion. Marriage is none too easy, as you seem to have found. You can worry through if you play fair and fight through the emotional storms that threaten to drown you. Now it isn’t fair for a man to draw off his emotional disturbances in drink or money-making or gambling or flirtation; and it isn’t fair for a woman to draw off hers in religion. Women are devils at that. They go off to church and come back as cold as ice, with their hands full of little parcels of principles and precepts, all forgiveness and humility and submission and iron virtue. Some men can live with it. I can’t. That’s the whole story.”
“Thank you,” said René.