“I beg your pardon. Our whole system of social culture is built upon experience accepted and not bought. It is not the Catholics alone who hold by tradition, we all do it, or are barbarians. Progress without it is impracticable. We start from the accumulated experience of the past, handed on to us by the traditions of our fathers. If everyone began by rejecting the acquisitions of the past, advance would be limited to the term of man’s natural life, for everyone would begin from the beginning; whereas, each generation now starts where the last generation left off. It is like the hill of Hissarlik where there are cities superposed the one on the other, and each is an advance culturally and artistically on that below—above the Greek Ilium, below the Homeric Troy, under that the primeval hovel of the flint-chipper.”
“Each on the ruins of the other.”
“Each using up the material of the other, following the acquisitions of the earlier builders and pushing further on to structural perfection.”
“That may be true of material process,” said Arminell, “but, morally, it is not true. Besides, our forefathers made blunders. I have been speaking with Mr. Saltren about the Flatheads and the Chinese who compress the heads and double up the feet of children. But our ancestors were nearly as stupid. Look at the monument of the first Lord Lamerton in the church. See the swaddled babies represented on it, cross-gartered like Malvolio. Now we give freedom to our babies, let them stretch, and scramble, and sprawl. But you old ladies still treat us young girls as your great-grandmothers treated their babies. You swaddle us, and keep us swaddled all our life long. No wonder we resent it. The babies got emancipated, and so will we. I have heard both papa and you say that when you were children you were not allowed to draw nearer the fire than the margin of the rug. Was there sense in that? Was the fire lighted to radiate its heat over an area circumscribed by the mat, and that the little prim mortals with blue noses and frosty fingers must shiver beyond the range of its warmth? We do not see it. We will step across the rug, and if we are cold, step inside the fender.”
“And set fire to your skirts?”
“We will go for warmth where it is to be found, and not keep aloof from it because of the vain traditions of the elders.”
Lady Lamerton sighed.
“Well, dear,” she said, “we will not argue the matter. To shift the subject, I hardly think it was showing much good feeling in you to come straight out here after I had expressed my wish that you would not. It was not what I may term—pretty.”
“I had promised Mr. Saltren to return to him and resume the thread of our interrupted conversation. Why did you send for me about old Ceely’s past history, as if I cared a straw for that?”
“I sent for you, Armie, because you were walking with the tutor, and Mrs. Cribbage had observed it. She told me, also, that you had been seen with him when you ought to have been at church.”