We are ill appreciated, we cynics; on my honour if cynicism be not the highest homage to Virtue there is, I should like to know what Virtue wants. We sigh over her absence, and we glorify her perfections. But Virtue is always a trifle stuck-up, you know, and she is very difficult to please.
She is always looking uneasily out of the "tail of her eye" at her opposition-leader Sin, and wondering why Sin dresses so well, and drinks such very good wine. We "cynics" tell her that under Sin's fine clothes there is a breast cancer-eaten, and at the bottom of the wine there is a bitter dreg called satiety; but Virtue does not much heed that; like the woman she is, she only notes that Sin drives a pair of ponies in the sunshine, while she herself is often left to plod wearily through the everlasting falling rain. So she dubs us "cynics" and leaves us—who can wonder if we won't follow her through the rain? Sin smiles so merrily if she makes us pay toll at the end; whereas Virtue—ah me, Virtue will find such virtue in frowning!
Women always put me in mind of that bird of yours, the cuckoo.
Your poetry and your platitudes have all combined to attach a most sentimental value to cuckoos and women. All sorts of pretty phantasies surround them both; the springtide of the year, the breath of early flowers, the verse of old dead poets, the scent of sweet summer rains, the light of bright dewy dawns—all these things you have mingled with the thought of the cuckoo, till its first call through the woods in April brings all these memories with it. Just so in like manner have you entangled your poetic ideals, your dreams of peace and purity, all divinities of patience and of pity, all sweet saintly sacrifice and sorrow, with your ideas of women.
Well—cuckoos and women, believe me, are very much like each other, and not at all like your phantasy:—to get a well-feathered nest without the trouble of making it, and to keep easily in it themselves, no matter who may turn out in the cold, is both cuckoo and woman all over; and, while you quote Herrick and Wordsworth about them as you walk in the dewy greenwood, they are busy slaying the poor lonely fledglings, that their own young may lie snug and warm.
"Then everybody is a hypocrite?"
"Not a bit, child. We always like what we haven't got; and people are quite honest very often in their professions, though they give the lie direct to them in their practice. People can talk themselves into believing that they believe anything. When the preacher discourses on the excellence of holiness, he may have been a thoroughgoing scamp all his life; but it don't follow he's dishonest, because he's so accustomed to talk goody-goody talk that it runs off his lips as the thread off a reel——"