“Only in healthy flesh,” said Quixtus, with his tired smile. “So in a gangrened soul there can be built up no fresh tissue of illusions.”
Womanlike, she begged the question, maintaining that there was no such thing as a gangrened soul. She shuddered prettily. Belief therein was a horrible superstition. She proclaimed her faith in the ultimate good of things. Quixtus said ironically:
“The ultimate good takes a long time coming. In the ages in which I, as a student, am interested, men slew each other with honest hatchets. Now they slay by the poisoned word and the treacherous deed. The development of mind has for its history the development of craft and cunning, of which the supreme results are a religion as to whose essential tenets scarcely two persons can agree, a rule of thumb arrangement of purely mechanical appliances, which is the so-called wonder of wireless telegraphy, and an infinite capacity for cruelty which has rendered Hell a mild and futile shadow in human speculation. Whatever hellishness human imagination could invent as the work of devils, calm history, the daily newspaper, your own experience of life tells you has already been surpassed by the work of man. Sometimes one is tempted to cry, like Ferdinand in The Tempest, ‘Hell is empty, and all the devils are here!’ But if it was, and the devils were here, they would be hard put to it to find a society in which they should not be compelled to hold up their tails before their snouts in shame and horror. You would find them meeker than the meekest of the Young Men’s Christian Association.”
He spoke with a certain crazy earnestness which arrested Lena Fontaine. Heartless, desperate, cynical though she was, intelligent too and swift of brain, she had never formulated to herself so disastrous a philosophy. She leaned forward, an elbow on the wickerwork table.
“Such a faith is dreadful,” she said, seriously. “It reduces living among one’s fellow creatures to walking through a horde of savages—never knowing whether some one may not club you on the head or stab you in the back.”
“Can you ever tell whether your dearest friend isn’t going to stab you in the back?” asked Quixtus.
His pale blue eyes held her with a curious insistence. Her eyelids flickered with something like shame, as though she had divined a personal application of the question. She shivered; this time naturally.
“Oh, I love to believe in goodness,” she exclaimed, “although I may not practise every virtue myself. There would be no sunshine in a purely wicked world.” She plucked up courage and looked him in the face.
“Do you think I, for instance, am just one mass of badness?”
“My dear Mrs. Fontaine,” replied the pessimist, with his courtly smile, “you must not crush me by using the privilege of your sex—arguing from general to particular.”