“And yet my meaning has scarcely any relation to his,” Hadria hastened to say. “He meant to drag down all belief in goodness by reminding us of dark moments and hours; by placarding the whole soul with the name of some shadow that moves across it, I sometimes think from another world, some deep under-world that yawns beneath us and sends up blackness and fumes and strange cries.” Hadria’s eyes had wandered far away. “Are you never tormented by an idea, an impression that you know does not belong to you?”
Lady Engleton gave a startled negative. “Professor Fortescue, come and tell me what you think of this strange doctrine?”
“If we had to be judged by our freedom from rushes of evil impulse, rather than by our general balance of good and evil wishing, I think those would come out best, who had fewest thoughts and feelings of any kind to record.” The subject attracted a small group.
“Unless goodness is only a negative quality,” Valeria pointed out, “a mere absence, it must imply a soul that lives and struggles, and if it lives and struggles, it is open to the assaults of the devil.”
“Yes, and it is liable to go under too sometimes, one must not forget,” said Hadria, “although most people profess to believe so firmly in the triumph of the best—how I can’t conceive, since the common life of every day is an incessant harping on the moral: the smallest, meanest, poorest, thinnest, vulgarest qualities in man and woman are those selected for survival, in the struggle for existence.”
There was a cry of remonstrance from idealists.
“But what else do we mean when we talk by common consent of the world’s baseness, harshness, vulgarity, injustice? It means surely—and think of it!—that it is composed of men and women with the best of them killed out, as a nerve burnt away by acid; a heart won over to meaner things than it set out beating for; a mind persuaded to nibble at edges of dry crust that might have grown stout and serviceable on generous diet, and mellow and inspired with noble vintage.”
“You really are shockingly Bacchanalian to-day,” cried Lady Engleton.
Hadria laughed. “Metaphorically, I am a toper. The wonderful clear sparkle, the subtle flavour, the brilliancy of wine, has for me a strange fascination; it seems to signify so much in life that women lose.”
“True. What beverage should one take as a type of what they gain by the surrender?” asked Lady Engleton, who was disposed to hang back towards orthodoxy, in the presence of her uncompromising neighbour.