“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose the upper classes, the people of leisure, existed to evolve culture. That can now be grafted on to the artisan, and both the upper and the lower classes can disappear. We want the amalgam now—culture without its vices, and work without its vulgarity.”
“Shall we ever get what we want?”
She smiled with ineffable sadness and weariness. “I sometimes think that that makes life worth living. That and bishops. This is the only world in which bishops could happen. There is some consolation, too, in Royal Drawing-rooms and kangaroos. Do you think there is any other planet in which ladies walk backward or animals hop? I wonder. When one feels weary of the burden of existence, one thinks of the humor of Creation and stays on. It is a delicious world.”
“Do you mean that you enjoy the imperfections of life?”
“I don’t know what I mean. I hate to see ill-fed people, and I hate to see well-fed people. Unhappy people pain me and happy people irritate me. What do I mean? Oh, I think I see it at last. It is the unintelligent people that I hate to see unhappy, and the intelligent people that I hate to see happy. People who have brains and are happy can’t have souls. The fools ought to have creature comforts because they are fools enough to value them before all else. How I envy my maid’s capacity for envying me! Thank you, Mr. Strang, you have enabled me to understand myself.”
The music stopped, but the player was at once monopolized by the bishop. Fragments of their conversation reached the ears of the couple.
“She’s trying to convert him to Christianity,” Olive observed, gravely; “didn’t I tell you she was the most unpractical creature? She’s always leading forlorn hopes.”
“How is Herbert—my cousin—painting her?” he asked.
“Oh! he’s only had one sitting. She’s to be done à l’ordinaire, but she had her hair dressed specially—such a waste of time—and was manicured, and the man took as long manicuring her as if she had been Briareus.”