"Which of us two is most diseased," answered Emilius, "is a point I will not attempt to decide. Your astonishing levity, your craving for dissipation, your restless hunting after pleasures which do not reach the heart, but only leave it sick and weary, does not seem to me to indicate a very healthy frame of mind. Granted, however, if you will, that my feeling is mere weakness, you would do better in some things to let it take its way; and there is nothing in the whole world which drives me more frantic than a ball with its fearful music. Some one has said that to a deaf man, who cannot hear the music, a ball-room must look like Bedlam let loose; but to me this terrible music itself, these infernal tunes whirling and whizzing round with inconceivable swiftness faster and faster, seizing all one's thoughts, saturating one's body and soul, and haunting one like so many spectres,—is not this the very jubilee of frenzy and madness itself? If dancing is ever to be endurable to me, it must be to the tune of silence."
"Well done, Mr. Paradox," said his friend; "you have got to this, have you? to find the innocentest, naturalest, pleasantest thing in the world a horrid, unnatural monster."
"I cannot help my feelings," said he very seriously; "as long as I can remember, these tunes have made me miserable, have often driven me to despair. To me they are the fiends and furies of the world of sound; they squeak and gibber round my head, and grin at me with hideous laughter."
"Mere nervousness," answered the other; "it is just like your ridiculous horror of spiders, and a number of other innocent creatures."
"Innocent you call them," he said passionately, "because they do not affect you; but some people feel, and I am one of them, at the sight of these hideous creatures, such as toads and spiders, or that most odious of all nature's abortions, the bat, their very souls shaken with unutterable horror and loathing; to them they can be neither indifferent nor unmeaning, because their very being is the contradiction of their own. Truly one may laugh at unbelievers whose imagination is too weak for ghosts and hobgoblins, and other children of darkness that we see in fevers or in one of Dante's pictures, when the commonest life gives us master-pieces of all that is most horrible. No one can have a real love for the beautiful unless he feels a hatred of these monsters."
"Why feel hatred?" asked Roderick. "Look at the sea, the great water-kingdom, full of the strangest, comicalest, most amusing figures, the whole deep looking like a grotesque masquerade; why is one to find nothing there but the horrible phantoms your mind makes them seem to you? But these fancies of yours do not stop here; you make an idol of the rose, while for other flowers you have as passionate a hatred. What has the poor orange-lily done to offend you, and the many other beautiful children of the summer? So there are colours you cannot bear, and scents, and thoughts. And you never do any thing to overcome these repugnances; you yield to the first temptation; so that at last, instead of a person, you will be nothing but a bundle of whims and caprices."
Emilius was now angry to the bottom of his heart, and would not answer. He had given up all present purpose of making his communication; indeed, importantly as he had said he had a secret that he wished to tell, his volatile friend seemed to have no curiosity to hear it, but sat playing with his mask on the sofa in the greatest indifference. At last he cried out suddenly, "Be so good, Emilius, as to lend me your large cloak."
"What for?" he asked.
"I hear music in the church yonder," answered Roderick. "I have never happened to be at home any evening at this hour before, and now it comes in just at the very nick of time. I can put on your cloak over my dress; and when the service is over, go on straight to the ball."
Emilius muttered something, and fetched the cloak from his wardrobe, which he flung to Roderick, who had just risen, with an ironical laugh.