“Oh! Do you mean that?” she exclaimed.
“Of course I mean it! Ordinary men are exceedingly stupid—they have just two predominating ideas, food and money. The world loses nothing when this sort of eating, spending microbes are cleared out by a big war—on the contrary things go on better without them after they are killed off.”
“And the women who loved them?” she asked, indignantly.
He smiled.
“You are a dear little goose!” he said, quite kindly. “You are always thinking about people who ‘love’ each other. How many of them do you suppose there are?”
She made no reply.
“Love,” went on the Philosopher, “is a rare thing. In fact it is so rare that it may be said not to exist,—except in romantic novels and poetry,—two very unreliable forms of literature. What is called ‘love’ is merely the attraction of opposite sexes—the ordinary procedure of the world of nature.” He paused. He was much inclined to discourse on the propagation of species, but somehow he found it difficult. The graceful little figure beside him hardly suited his ideas of intended comparison with the rest of the animal world. Strictly speaking, she was of course an animal of the female gender, as he was an animal of the male,—but he could not fit in his discourse on natural selection with a bunch of white frippery, fair hair and a winsome smile. “Love,” he concluded, lamely, “is a poet’s dream.”
“I wonder you admit it is as much as that!” she said,—and her eyes flashed. “I agree with you to some extent—but to me it is God’s dream of the world!”
He gazed at her, amused.
“Very far-fetched!” he said. “Did you get that out of a book? Of course you did! Well, all I can say is that if there is a God dreaming anything about the world, the dream is something of a nightmare. You’re a woman and you don’t think. Have you ever seen a London slum? No. Well, men and women herd there together like brutes, wives striking husbands and husbands kicking wives, while little sentimentalists like you live in the country among roses and talk about ‘love.’ Love! Fiddlesticks! Very young people—girls and boys,—imagine they ‘love’ like Romeo and Juliet,—but have you ever thought how Romeo and Juliet would have got on as Mr. and Mrs. Montagu?”