"It's this: That we make the mistake of regarding the world as full of rational people, with perhaps a few particularly stupid ones here and there. Now if you'll only regard it as full of perfect zenies, with just once in a while a reasonable being among them, that would explain everything."
"You'd better go to sleep again, Julia."
"But it is so. I see it, oh so clearly! And you don't worry about anything then—what anybody thinks or says or does or anything. You just take the funny old peepshow as it is. That's the way to live."
"On an endless walking-tour?"
"Why not, if you're in jolly places all the time?"
"Siena? Nîmes? Trieste?"
"Literal George!... But really, nothing matters. Everything except the present moment is meant to be forgotten. It's the only one you live in. In the past you're dead and in the future you aren't born yet—except him.... George——"
"Hm?"
"Girls nowadays do have an awfully easy time!... You've only got to look at their clothes. We dressed down to our toes and up to our ears, and that meant we had to take a good deal of trouble about things. We had to make a little go a long way, so to speak—talk, and smile, and be amusing, and think what we said. If we didn't we were soon left out in the cold. But girls nowadays simply powder their shoulder blades and dress to their knees more or less, and that's all. Lots of 'em never open their mouths except to eat. They don't do anything; they get there by undoing something.... But how boring for you, George. What does it matter as long as you do get there?"