“Perhaps I make that confession if you insist upon the measure of my ignorance.”
“Say rather, my hero, the measure of your inexperience. You see you have only studied those of my sex who are affiliated to the Great Trades’ Union. They take eternal vows of foolishness and duncishness before they are admitted to membership of that sanctified order. But with us black-legs it is different. We are allowed to know everything. You may not know that in our University of the Gutter we have the most learned staff of professors in the world. There is a chair for everything.”
“Except for honesty. If there was a chair for that, would there not at once be an end to your intellectual subtlety?”
“You do not know the great university to which I have the honor to belong if you think intellectual dishonesty is tolerated among us. The moment we become intellectually dishonest we have done forever with Alma Mater. She sends us down immediately, and there is nothing for us then but the river or the Great Trades’ Union.”
“That is what the world would call being ‘sent up.’ Yet if the simplest terms were not subject to totally different meanings in the varying strata of our society, we should not have so many of these pretty paradoxes to subsist upon. But I feel, Diomeda, that I am entitled to ask you one question. Was it in my capacity as a mentally dishonest person that you came to me to-night to ask me to arrange for you to be ‘sent down’ from your university?”
“Answer that question to your own liking, beloved one. It was your appeal on my behalf that brought me here to-night. Would you have me ask whether you were mentally honest when you made it?”
Her laugh had an edge that cut him like a keen blade. But she was quick to read the sharp thrill of pain that made his eyes grow dark.
“Do not repine, my beloved Achilles,” she said with a softness that had the power to caress, “I found you after all to be as honest as I am myself.”
“At least,” said the young man, sensible that even her lightest caresses possessed the ferocity of those of the snake and the tiger, “you are the first of your sex with whom I have conversed who appears to understand the uses of paradox.”
“There is no other means by which the honest mind can carry on its thinking.”