“Have you ever read this?” he asked, holding up his novel. It was Bourget's “Cruelle Enigme.”
Kent nodded.
“I skimmed it through here one night while waiting for you. I have no patience with that sort of thing.”
“Possibly not,” remarked Wither, “but that's a fact about yourself, and not about the book.”
“I don't believe it is human life,” replied Kent. “People can't make animal passion the keynote of their lives nowadays.”
“Why not nowadays?”
“The conditions of life prevent it. The savage has furious brute instincts, which he gratifies occasionally, when his mind is not taken up with fighting and hunting for his food. It may be the guiding principle in a splendid barbarism like some Eastern courts, where men have little else to think of. But in our modern civilisation there are other interests too absorbing. The hurry of life is too great.”
“What about the empty-minded women you are always railing at?”
“They are all absorbed in their futilities—at least most of them,” he added, correcting himself; “but even when idle they are not beasts. Now this woman you are reading about is a beast.”
Wither eyed him curiously.