He persisted. “You’d do it yourself if you had to suffer from them.”
“Very probably. Is that an answer? What I’d never do would be to make a show, an entertainment, a circus, out of it, run excursion trains to see it—come, should you like your sister to buy tickets for a lynching?”
This brought him up rather short. “I should never take part myself,” he presently stated, “unless it were immediate personal vengeance.”
“Few brothers or husbands would blame you,” I returned. “It would be hard to wait for the law. But let no community which treats it as a public spectacle presume to call itself civilized.”
He gave a perplexed smile, shaking his head over it. “Sometimes I think civilization costs—”
“Civilization costs all you’ve got!” I cried.
“More than I’ve got!” he declared. “I’m mortal tired of civilization.”
“Ah, yes! What male creature is not? And neither of us will live quite long enough to see the smash-up of our own.”
“Aren’t you sometimes inconsistent?” he inquired, laughing.
“I hope so,” I returned. “Consistency is a form of death. The dead are the only perfectly consistent people.”