"That is the hypocrisy of the vicious," Beth said, with her eyes fixed meditatively on the fire, "the people who lay down excellent principles, and publicly profess them for the sake of standing well with society, but privately make exceptions for themselves in any arrangement that may suit their own convenience. Your people of 'exceptional temperament' settle moral difficulties by not allowing any moral consideration to clash with their inclinations, and misery comes of it. The plea of exceptional character, exceptional circumstances, exceptional temperament, and what not, is merely another way of expressing exceptional selfishness and excusing exceptional self-indulgence."
"Surely you are not content to be a mere slave to social convention!" he exclaimed.
"I am talking of fundamental principles, not of social conventions," she replied; "please to discriminate. Self-control is not slavery, but emancipation; to control our passions makes us lords of ourselves and free of our most galling bonds—the bonds of the flesh."
"What a drawback the want of—er—a proper philosophic training is," he observed. "Culture does a great deal. It makes us more modest, for one thing. I don't suppose you know, for instance, that you are setting up an opinion of your own in opposition to such men as Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer maintained that as the man of genius gave his whole life for the profit of humanity, he had a license of conduct which was not accorded to the rest of mankind."
"If culture leaves us liable to be taken in by a false postulate of any man's, however well turned the postulate or able the man, then I have no respect for culture. The fact that Schopenhauer said such a thing does not prove it true. An assertion like that is a mere matter of opinion. Half the worry in the world is caused by differences of opinion. Let us have the facts and form our own opinions. Have the men of genius who allowed themselves license of conduct been any the better for it? the happier? the greater? Schopenhauer himself, for instance!" She smiled at him with honest eyes when she had spoken, and took another sandwich. "But don't let us talk sophistry and silliness," she proceeded, "nor the kind of abstract that serves as a cover for unrighteousness. Those tricks don't carry conviction to my uncultivated mind. I know how they're done."
"You are lowering yourself in my estimation," he said severely.
"And what comes after that?" she asked.
He shook his head and gazed at her reproachfully. "How can you be so trivial," he said, "in a moment like this?—you who are situated even as I am. If we were to die now, in six months it would be as though we had never been. No one would remember us."
"But what have we done for any one," Beth asked, in her equable way, "that we should be specially remembered?"
He made no reply, and Beth went on with the sandwiches.