“You are talking nonsense, old chap. If she had been simply that, she would not have been a problem to the psychologist. The enigma was the sudden burst into animalism in the midst of a love that was almost idyllic.”
“Bosh!” said Kent. “It was the same old hideous adultery.”
“Oh, well! if you go on those lines, I am done,” replied Wither, shrugging his shoulders. “I thought we were a little more advanced in our ideas in this establishment.”
“You know I don't mean that,” said Kent, puffing violently at his pipe. “The legality of the connection has nothing to do with it. It is the eternal coupling of the male and the female that revolts me. Pah! They might as well write a novel on the loves of the pastures.”
“If I could write French, I should like to try it,” said Wither. “It would be interesting.”
“There is too much of that sort of thing written and talked about,” said Kent. “It's sickening. It's degradation of humanity.”
“Well, it's not uncommon,” said Wither, with a sphinxlike smile playing round the corners of his mouth as he gazed upwards at the cigarette smoke.
“Look here, Wither,” said Kent; “I have a higher faith in humanity. You profess to be a cynic, a man of the world, and you delight in calling yourself nonmoral. That's all foolishness, I know. You are the kindest hearted little chap in the world. But can you, as a man of intellectual tastes, sympathise with all this animalism?”
Wither threw away his cigarette, and bending forward laid his hand on Kent's knee.
“My dear old boy,” he said, with more earnestness than he generally displayed, “I do call myself a man of the world, for I'm in it and I love it, and I have a very decent bowing acquaintance as well with its pals, the Flesh and the Devil. I know something of men, and as for women, it has been my lot to have been petted by a good few—my size lends itself to that sort of thing. In fact, Gulliver with the Brobdingnag maids of honour is not in it with me. I know all about 'em; and I tell you, old chap, that the Beast, sometimes with a big B and sometimes in diamond type, lies in the nature of us all. There is not a living being with pure blood in his or her veins who is not overmastered at times by the principle of sex. You scoff at Bourget as a writer of morbid and impossible fiction. Look at your daily papers. Don't you see parsons of hitherto blameless lives running off with their cooks, virtuous women ruining their lives and their husbands' for the sake of some Hercules of a scoundrel—just as the patrician ladies in Rome went mad over the charioteers in the circus! Man alive! it is the Beast, the Beast that may slumber in an old maid's bosom until she is sixty and then drive her into the arms of her footman. How otherwise have you accounted for these things?”