Soon they formed in couples.
“What does our friend think about it?” said Phrasilas with his piping voice.
“I feel perfectly happy,” answered Timon. “I have never before so clearly understood the supreme mission of women.”
“And what is it?”
“Prostitution, either with or without art.”
“That is only an opinion.”
“Phrasilas, once again, we know that nothing can be proved: worse still, we know that nothing exists, and that even that is not certain. This being conceded and in order to satisfy your celebrated mania, permit me to hold a theory at once contestable and antiquated, as all of them are, but interesting to me, who affirm it, and to the majority of men, who deny it. In the ease of thought, originality is an ideal still more chimerical than certitude. You are aware of that.”
“Give me some Lesbian wine,” said Seso to the slave. “It is stronger than the other.”
“I maintain,” Timon went on, “that the married woman, by devoting herself to a man who deceives her, by refusing herself to all others (or by committing adultery very rarely, which comes to the same thing), by giving birth to children who deform her before they see the light and monopolise her when they are born,—I maintain that by living thus a woman destroys her life without merit, and that on her wedding-day a young girl concludes a dupe’s bargain.”
“She acts in fancied obedience to a duty,” said Naukrates without conviction.