I said I was sorry we had digressed so far, and feared we had not arrived anywhere, after all. Florence said she liked to confess her sins. And Marian answered her that it was a bad habit.
“It is all,” said Marian, “what I have heard before, and know to be true, and don’t do, anyway.”
“Nothing new?” I asked. “Not even the plan of trying to feel at once just what the other person is feeling?”
“Oh, yes, that, perhaps,” she said.
Marian seemed to think I had given her a great many dreadful “slams”; but I could not see it so. “I am sure I did not,” I said. “Oh, no,” she answered quite sarcastically, “not at all.” But she seemed to bear me no ill-will. Virginia said I wanted them to be good and virtuous. No, I said, I had not thought of that.
“Perhaps,” she suggested, “good but not virtuous, or virtuous but not good?”
I answered: “All I want you to do is to satisfy yourselves.”
“Is that all!” exclaimed Marian. “After you told us how we could never be wholly satisfied, how we should always want something more!”
“The beautiful life must be harmonious,” I said. “Disjointed beauty is not beautiful. You remember, we spoke of the city, how a beautiful house might be made to look not at all beautiful by being placed next to a high wall, or in any position where it did not fit; how the city could not be beautiful until all the people combined to build a harmonious city.”
“By itself the house would be beautiful, anyway,” they said.