The Prince had listened; but, always with propriety, he didn’t commit himself. “Terrible?”
“Well, unless one is almost as good as she. It makes too easy terms for one. It takes stuff, within one, so far as one’s decency is concerned, to stand it. And nobody,” Charlotte continued in the same manner, “is decent enough, good enough, to stand it—not without help from religion, or something of that kind. Not without prayer and fasting—that is without taking great care. Certainly,” she said, “such people as you and I are not.”
The Prince, obligingly, thought an instant. “Not good enough to stand it?”
“Well, not good enough not rather to feel the strain. We happen each, I think, to be of the kind that are easily spoiled.”
Her friend, again, for propriety, followed the argument. “Oh, I don’t know. May not one’s affection for her do something more for one’s decency, as you call it, than her own generosity—her own affection, HER ‘decency’—has the unfortunate virtue to undo?”
“Ah, of course it must be all in that.”
But she had made her question, all the same, interesting to him. “What it comes to—one can see what you mean—is the way she believes in one. That is if she believes at all.”
“Yes, that’s what it comes to,” said Charlotte Stant.
“And why,” he asked, almost soothingly, “should it be terrible?” He couldn’t, at the worst, see that.
“Because it’s always so—the idea of having to pity people.”