‘One must think about them or be at war with one’s conscience,’ he answered. ‘That is the tedium of life; its duties are so inexorable and so wearisome.’
‘Is an easy conscience absolutely necessary to you?’
‘No; I could easily imagine circumstances under which a guilty one would make me carry it lightly.’
A gleam of the old passionate emotion which she had once known in him passed for a moment into his eyes with gloom and fire mingled. He repressed it; he did not wish her to believe that she had still the power over his life which she actually possessed. He heard her voice saying always, ‘I will have no melodramatic passions to disturb me; they are absurd, they are out of date, they are tiresome.’
And she had said it out of no virtue, only out of sheer shallowness and indifference.
‘That is a very shocking sentiment,’ she said demurely now, as she ate another strawberry. ‘At least, one is bound to say so; Monsignore in there would certainly say so. Indeed, from Monsignore’s point of view, one would certainly think it so; but as all we modern people, whatever church we ostensibly belong to, are all so completely of one mind that we know we are only automata, made up of nerve-centres and different gases, I do not see why we should necessarily have consciences at all, do you? Why should we have one any more than the zostera from which I named that yacht?’
‘Only because the zosteræ have no traditions of a conscience, all men have.’
‘All men? Savages have not, primitive races have not; and how should we know whether the zostera has or has not? She may have a very perfect system of ethics, sitting on her rocks in reach of the tide—I should think, indeed, she had a sort of Buddhism.’
‘You named that yacht?’ he said abruptly.
‘Yes; Geraldine had her built last year. He is not like you; he has not a superstition that one is bound to go on sailing in the same ship all one’s life, however old-fashioned she may grow.’