“I!” said Janicot. Then he said: “For all that, I am impressed. Yes, men are really wonderful. However, let that pass. So it is Jahveh of whom you approve. You confess it. Why, then, I ask you, as one logical person addressing another—”
“A pest! logic is a fine thing, but let us not put these matters altogether upon the ground of logic,” said Florian, recoiling just perceptibly, as a large tumble-bug climbed on the rock, and sat beside Janicot.
“—I ask you,” Janicot continued, “as one person of good taste addressing another—”
“It is not wholly an affair of connoisseurs. Let us talk about something else.”
“—For you have this Jahveh’s own history of his exploits all written down at his own dictation. I allow him candor, nor, for one so young, does he write badly. For the rest, do these cruelties, these double-dealings, these self-confessed divine blunders and miscalculations, these subornings of murders and thefts and adulteries, these punishments of the innocent, not sparing even his own family—”
Florian yawned delicately, but without removing his eyes from the tumble-bug. “My dear Monsieur Janicot, that sort of talk is really rather naïve: it is, if you will pardon my frankness, quite out of date now that we have reached the eighteenth century.”
“Yes, but—”
“No, Monsieur Janicot, I can consent to hear no more of these sophomoric blasphemies. I must tell you I have learned that in these matters, as in all matters, it is better taste to recognize some drastic regeneration may be necessary without doing anything about it, and certainly without aligning ourselves with the foul anarchistic mockers of everything in our social chaos which is making for beauty and righteousness—”
“Why, but, Monsieur the Duke,” said Janicot, “but what—!”
“I must tell you I perceive, in honest sorrow, that with a desire for fescennine expression you combine a vulgar atheism and an iconoclastic desire to befoul the sacred ideas of the average man or woman, collectively scorned as the bourgeoisie—”