"They should be kept in their proper place, then," she answered. "You may choose what you please to point a moral, but for pity's sake be careful about what you use to adorn a tale."
"Moral or no moral," said the young sculptor, "I think a new poem of any kind a thing to be thankful for."
"And do you call that kind of thing new?" said Ideala. "I should say it was a fine compound of all the poems of the kind, and several other kinds, that have ever been written, with a dash of the peculiarly refined immorality of our own times, from which nothing is sacred; thrown in to make weight. Such writing,
Like a new disease, unknown to men,
Creeps, no precaution used, among the crowd,
. . . . . . . . . . . and saps
The fealty of our friends, and stirs the pulse
With devil's leaps, and poisons half the young.
It is the feeling of the day accurately defined. Nobody sighs for love and peace now. The cry is for the indulgence of some fiery passion for an hour, and then, perdition!—if you like—since that is the recognised price of it."
"Our loves are more intense than they used to be," said the sculptor, sighing.
"Love!" Ideala answered. "Oh, do not desecrate 'the eternal God-word, love!' There is little enough of that in the business that goes by its name now-a-days. I am a lady—I cannot use the right word. But it is none the less the thing I mean because it calls blasphemously on God Almighty to help it to fulfil itself."
"Well," said Charlie Lloyd, deprecatingly, "I didn't offer this, you know, as an admirable specimen of what our day can produce. I told you I hadn't read it, and now that I have I don't suppose any one has offered it to the public as a serious expression of sentiment."
"You do not think people write books about what they really feel?" said Ideala. "I believe they do when the feeling is shameful. If you want to keep a secret, publish the exact truth in a book, and nobody will believe a word of it. I think people who publish such productions should be burned on a pile of their own works."
"The writer is young, doubtless," I said, apologetically. It gives one a shock to hear a woman say harsh things.