“Why do you indulge in it, then?”
“I? Is it I who indulge in levity?”
“Assuredly, I do not!” Oh, woman’s privilege of saying unabashedly the thing which is not!
“No,” said he, “for there’s no levity in the coldness with which beauty views the wounds it makes.”
“I’m sure one is not compelled to offer oneself to its wounds.”
“No,—nor the moth to seek the flame.”
“La, now you are a moth,—a moment ago, a rose-bush,—”
“And you are ten million roses, grown in the garden of heaven, and fashioned into one body there, by some celestial Praxiteles!”
“Dear me, am I all that?”