‘My dear Monsignore,’ she said, with amusement and admiration; ‘for enwrapping a kernel of religious advice in an envelope of agreeable social conversation, there is not your equal anywhere—you may well be beloved of the Propaganda! But, alas! it is all wasted on me.’
Melville reddened a little with irritation:
‘I understand,’ he answered. ‘I fear, Princess, that you are like Virschow or Paul Bert, who are so absorbed in cutting, burning, and electrifying the nerves of dogs that the dog, as a sentient creature, a companion, and a friend, is wholly unknown to them. Humanity, poor Humanity, is your dog.’
‘Will you have some tea?’ she said, as Mahmoud brought in her service made by goldsmiths of the Deccan, who sat on mats under their banana trees, with the green parrots flying over the aloes and the euphorbia, and who produced work beside which all the best which Europe can do with her overgrown workshops is clumsy, inane, and vulgar.
‘What you suggested was very pretty,’ she continued, pouring out the clear golden stream on the slices of lemon; ‘and I had no right to laugh at you for wrapping up a sermon in nougat. Of course the character ought to be trained and developed just like the body and the mind, only nobody thinks so; no education is conducted on those lines. And so, though we overstrain the second, and pamper the third, we wholly neglect the first. I imagine that it never occurs to anyone out of the schoolroom to restrain a bad impulse or uproot a bad quality. Why should it? We are all too busy in trying to be amused, and failing. Do you not think it was always so in the world? Do you suppose La Bruyère, for instance, ever turned his microscope on himself? And do you think, if he had done, that any amount of self-scrutiny would have made La Bruyère Pascal or Vincent de Paul?’
‘No; but it might have made him comprehend them, or their likenesses. I did not mean to moralise, madame; I merely meant that the issue of self-analysis is sympathy, whilst the issue of the anatomy of other organisations is cruelty even where it may be wisdom.’
‘That may be true in general, and I daresay is so; but the exception proves the rule, and I am the exception. Whenever I do think about myself I only arrive at two conclusions; the one, that I am not as well amused as I ought to be considering the means I have at my disposal, and the other is that, if I were quite sure that anything would amuse me very much, I should sacrifice everything else to enjoy it. Neither of those results is objective in its sympathies; and you would not, I suppose, call either of them moral.’
‘I certainly should not,’ said Melville, ‘except that there is always a certain amount of moral health in any kind of perfect frankness.’
‘I am always perfectly frank,’ said the Princess Nadine; ‘so is Bismarck. But the world has made up its mind that we are both of us always feigning.’