“Wisdom is nothing compared to beauty,” said Gervase. “A beautiful woman can turn the wisest man into a fool.”
The Princess laughed lightly.
“Yes, and a moment afterwards he regrets his folly,” she said. “He clamors for the beautiful woman as a child might cry for the moon, and when he at last possesses her, he tires. Satisfied with having compassed her degradation, he exclaims: ‘What shall I do with this beauty, which, because it is mine, now palls upon me? Let me kill it and forget it; I am aweary of love, and the world is full of women!’ That is the way of your sex, Monsieur Gervase; it is a brutal way, but it is the one most of you follow.”
“There is such a thing as love!” said Denzil, looking up quickly, a pained flush on his handsome face.
“In the hearts of women, yes!” said Ziska, her voice growing tremulous with strange and sudden passion. “Women love—ah!—with what force and tenderness and utter abandonment of self! But their love is in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred utterly wasted; it is a largesse flung to the ungrateful, a jewel tossed in the mire! If there were not some compensation in the next life for the ruin wrought on loving women, the Eternal God himself would be a mockery and a jest.”
“And is he not?” queried Gervase, ironically. “Fair Princess, I would not willingly shake your faith in things unseen, but what does the ‘Eternal God,’ as you call Him, care as to the destiny of any individual unit on this globe of matter? Does He interfere when the murderer’s knife descends upon the victim? And has He ever interfered? He it is who created the sexes and placed between them the strong attraction that often works more evil and misery than good; and what barrier has He ever interposed between woman and man, her natural destroyer? None!—save the trifling one of virtue, which is a flimsy thing, and often breaks down at the first temptation. No, my dear Princess; the ‘Eternal God,’ if there is one, does nothing but look on impassively at the universal havoc of creation. And in the blindness and silence of things, I cannot recognize an Eternal God at all; we were evidently made to eat, drink, breed and die—and there an end.”
“What of ambition?” asked Dr. Dean. “What of the inspiration that lifts a man beyond himself and his material needs, and teaches him to strive after the Highest?”
“Mere mad folly!” replied Gervase impetuously. “Take the Arts. I, for example, dream of painting a picture that shall move the world to admiration,—but I seldom grasp the idea I have imagined. I paint something,—anything,—and the world gapes at it, and some rich fool buys it, leaving me free to paint another something; and so on and so on, to the end of my career. I ask you what satisfaction does it bring? What is it to Raphael that thousands of human units, cultured and silly, have stared at his ‘Madonnas’ and his famous Cartoons?”
“Well, we do not exactly know what it may or may not be to Raphael,” said the Doctor, meditatively. “According to my theories, Raphael is not dead, but merely removed into another form, on another planet possibly, and is working elsewhere. You might as well ask what it is to Araxes now that he was a famous warrior once?”
Gervase moved uneasily.