'Your reasoning cannot be sound,' said the Professor, 'for it would lead to the most horrible conclusions. I will solve the difficulty better. I will make the old woman happy, and therefore fit to live. Old woman,' he exclaimed, 'let me beg you to consider this. You are yourself by your own unhappiness expiating your son's sins. Do but think of that, and you will become unspeakably happy.'
Meanwhile, however, the old woman had died. When the Professor discovered this he was somewhat shocked; but at length with a sudden change of countenance, 'We neither of us did it,' he exclaimed; 'her death is no act of ours. It is part of the eternal not-ourselves that makes for righteousness—righteousness, which is, as we all know, but another name for happiness. Let us adore the event with reverence.'
'Yes,' said the curate, 'we are well rid of her. She was an immoral old woman, for happiness is the test of morality, and she was very unhappy.'
'On the contrary,' said the Professor, 'she was a moral old woman; for she has made us happy by dying so very opportunely. Let us speak well of the dead. Her death has been a holy and a blessed one. She has conformed to the laws of matter. Thus is unhappiness destined to fade out of the world. Quick! let us tie a bag of shot to all the sorrow and evil of Humanity, which, after all, is only a fourth part of it, and let us sink her in the bay close at hand, that she may catch lobsters for us.'
CHAPTER IX.
At last,' said the Professor, as they began dinner that evening, 'the fulness of time has come. All the evils of Humanity are removed, and progress has come to an end because it can go no further. We have nothing now to do but to be unspeakably and significantly happy.'
The champagne flowed freely. Our friends ate and drank of the best, their spirits rose, and Virginia admitted that this was really 'jolly.' The sense of the word pleased the Professor, but its sound seemed below the gravity of the occasion; so he begged her to say 'sublime' instead. 'We can make it mean,' he said, 'just the same, but we prefer it for the sake of its associations.'
It soon, however, occurred to him that eating and drinking were hardly delights sufficient to justify the highest state of human emotion, and he began to fear he had been feeling sublime prematurely; but in another moment he recollected he was an altruist, and that the secret of their happiness was not that any one of them was happy, but that they each knew the others were.
'Yes, my dear curate,' said the Professor, 'what I am enjoying is the champagne that you drink, and what you are enjoying is the champagne that I drink. This is altruism; this is benevolence; this is the sublime outcome of enlightened modern thought. The pleasures of the table, in themselves, are low and beastly ones; but if we each of us are only glad because the others are enjoying them, they become holy and glorious beyond description.'