“It entertains you to see those shameless little gluttons making an exhibition of themselves!” he cried out.
“You must not speak disrespectfully of them,” she reproved him. “Some of them are very old. Carp often live to be two hundred, and they grow grey, for all the world like men.”
“They’re like men in twenty particulars,” asserted he, “though you, yesterday, denied it. See how the big ones elbow the little ones aside; see how fierce they all are in the scramble for your bounty. You wake their most evil passions. But the spectacle is instructive. It’s a miniature presentment of civilisation. Oh, carp are simply brimfull of human nature. You mentioned yesterday that they have no human feelings. You put your finger on the chief point of resemblance. It’s the absence of human feeling that makes them so hideously human.”
She looked at him with eyes that were interested, amused, yet not altogether without a shade of raillery in their depths. “That is what you call a healthy pessimistic view of things?” she questioned.
“It is an inevitable view if one honestly uses one’s sight, or reads one’s newspaper.”
“Oh, then I would rather not honestly use my sight,” said she; “and as for the newspaper, I only read the fashions. Your healthy pessimistic view of things can hardly add much to the joy of life.”
“The joy of life!”. he expostulated. “There’s no joy in life. Life is one fabric of hardship, peril, and insipidity.”
“Oh, how can you say that,” cried she, “in the face of such beauty as we have about us here? With the pure sky and the sunshine, and the wonderful peace of the day; and then these lawns and glades and the great green trees; and the sweet air, and the singing birds! No joy in life!”
“This isn’t life,” he answered. “People who shut themselves up in an artificial park are fugitives from life. Life begins at the park gates, with the natural countryside, and the squalid peasantry, and the sordid farmers, and the Jew money-lenders, and the uncertain crops.”
“Oh, it’s all life,” insisted she, “the park and the countryside, and the virgin forest and the deep sea, with all things in them. It’s all life. I’m alive, and I daresay you are. You would exclude from life all that is nice in life, and then say of the remainder, that only is life. You’re not logical.”