‘Do you suppose I never think? I believe I have read every socialistic writer from Rousseau to Bakounine. They do not convince me of anything except of the utter improbability that any real liberty will ever be obtainable from any congregation of men. Humanity is tyrannical and slavish at once; its governments are created in its own likeness, it makes little difference what they are called, they are human offspring, so they are narrow and arrogant.’
‘Poor humanity!’ said Melville. ‘It is only we priests who can lend it wings.’
‘Because you say to it, like Schiller, “Cheat yourself, and dream,”’ she replied. ‘But even there how narrow still! You say to each unit, "Save yourself!"’
‘Well,’ said the Englishman with good temper, ‘if every one sweep out his own little chamber, the whole city will be clean.’
‘The city will be for ever unclean. You know that as well as I do. Only, all Churchmen can hide their eyes ostrich-like in the sand of sonorous phrases. Your Christianity has been toiling for eighteen centuries, and, one may say, has accomplished nothing. It mouths a great deal, but practical result it has scarcely any. Its difficulty has always been that, being illogical in its essence and traditions, it must be restrained to words. Reduced to practice, all the modern world would fade away, riches would disappear, effort would be impossible, and the whole machinery of civilisation come to a standstill and entire disuse. You are as aware of that as I am, only you do not like to say so.’
She rose, amused at his discomfiture, and lighted another cigarette. She smoked as gracefully as a bird pecks at the dew in a rose.
‘She is the only woman who makes me irritable,’ the courtly Gervase Melville had once said of her, and he might have said also, ‘the only woman who reduces me to silence.’
‘Allow, Princess,’ he said irritably now, ‘ that whether we accredit Christianity with it or not, the life of poor Rose in her wooden shoes was much more useful than yours is in those pearl-embroidered mules.’
‘Ah,’ she answered with a smile. ‘You are indeed worsted in your logic if you must descend to personalities! Certainly I grant that; my life is of a most absolute inutility. It is, perhaps, now and then useful to my tailors, because I give them ideas they would not have without me. But to no one else. À qui la faute? I arrived in this world without any option. As Mr. Gladstone said when he was an Eton boy, responsibilities which are thrust upon us do not exact our obedience. It is the only sentiment of Mr. Gladstone with which I have ever been able to agree. Life is clearly thrust upon us. We none of us seek it, that is certain. If we are able to disport ourselves in it, like butterflies in a south wind, it says much in praise of the lightness of our hearts.’
‘Or of the levity of our consciences,’ said Melville, a little gloomily.