I did not press the point, for one naturally looks for modesty in a Virgin Queen.
“Do you mind telling me in what epoch you would have chosen to live?”
“The reign of Terrible Teddy, by all means. Hesiod says there are five ages of the world; how is yours designated: golden, brazen, or—?”
“This is the age of folly—the folly of flesh,” I answered. “Higher critics deny the decalogue and bone Jonah’s fish until it resembles an eel. Even our modern writers play ping pong with hearts and the seventh commandment, for to them love is nothing unless it brings in ten per cent royalty. Society has become sensuous; we are having rather too much of the body. The corsage serves no purpose but to hide the heart; bosom and back are bared before the footlights while gartered grace trips tantalizingly in the limelight. Soul has sunk beneath the seductions of the senses. The demon of desire so entices men that for the amorous allurement of Kipling’s Vampire—the woman who did not care—they would go to Hell and consider the trip an enjoyable excursion. Has virtue fled to hide its blushes in a nunnery and is there no longer a shrine of sex? Is ‘Don Juan’ to be deified and ‘Camille’ to be glorified? Will—but in deference to Colonel Comstock, I really must desist.”
“Wherefore so pessimistic—jaundiced or jilted?”
“More likely I’m dyspeptic.”
“Don’t deny it; a lost love is the only justification of a man’s being a misanthropist and a misogynist.”
“Won’t you kindly translate or at least tell me the language? Emerson always was a voiceless sphinx to me and foreign tongues are not articulate to ears deafened by the slang of the streets.”
“Don’t be silly! Your idiomatic Americanisms make muddy the well of English undefiled, but methinks the water is the clearer and the more sparkling after each stirring up.
“If you will promise no more interruptions, I will continue my lecture: Your eyes are too far gazing into the bygone to know to-day’s bliss or to foresee a confident tomorrow. You are forgetting that while life roots in the past, it flowers in the present. To never exchange loving glances with the maiden of the moment, but to dishonor the day by looking off into the eyes of some dream darling who cannot come to your bosom is like another Enoch Arden’s hopeless gaze for a sail that never brings him again to the kisses of Annie Lee. If I mistake not, your name is a patent of your English ancestry, but without that leaf from your family tree, I should recognize you as a countryman; to be loyal to a sweetheart clasped and lost is possible only to the man whose cradle rocked between the English Channel and the Irish Sea. The Anglo-Saxon alone of all peoples can become a martyr to a memory.”