What is the use of railing against Society? Society, after all, is only Humanity en masse, and the opinion of it must be the opinion of the bulk of human minds. Complaints against Society are like the lions' against the man's picture. No doubt the lions would have painted the combat as going just the other way, but then, so long as it is the man who has the knife or the gun, and the palette and the pencil, where is the use of the lions howling about injustice? Society has the knife and the pencil; that's the long and the short of it; and if people don't behave themselves they feel 'em both, and have to knock under. They're knifed first, and then caricatured—as the lions were.
"Excelling!—it is rather a Dead Sea apple, I fear. The effort is happiness, but the fruit always seems poor."
Lady Cardiff could not patiently hear such nonsense.
"There you are again, my dear feminine Alceste," she said irritably, "looking at things from your solitary standpoint on that rock of yours in the middle of the sea. You are thinking of the excelling of genius, of the possessor of an ideal fame, of the 'Huntress mightier than the moon' and I am thinking of the woman who excels in Society—who has the biggest diamonds, the best chef, the most lovers, the most chic and chien, who leads the fashion, and condescends when she takes tea with an empress. But even from your point of view on your rock, I can't quite believe it. Accomplished ambition must be agreeable. To look back and say, 'I have achieved!'—what leagues of sunlight sever that proud boast from the weary sigh, 'I have failed!' Fame must console."
"Perhaps; but the world, at least, does its best that it should not. Its glory discs are of thorns."
"You mean that superiority has its attendant shadow, which is calumny? Always has had, since Apelles painted. What does it matter if everybody looks after you when you pass down a street, what they say when you pass?"
"A malefactor may obtain that sort of flattery. I do not see the charm of it."
"You are very perverse. Of course I talk of an unsullied fame, not of an infamous notoriety."