"Good ones--certainly not!" said my companion. I suppose I had had
other views, for I remember saying that for myself I wasn't sure it
was bad for them if the novels were "good" to the right intensity of
goodness. "Bad for THEM, I don't say so much!" my companion
returned. "But very bad, I'm afraid, for the poor dear old novel
itself." That oblique accidental allusion to his wife's attitude was
followed by a greater breadth of reference as we walked home. "The
difference between us is simply the opposition between two distinct
ways of looking at the world, which have never succeeded in getting
on together, or in making any kind of common household, since the
beginning of time. They've borne all sorts of names, and my wife
would tell you it's the difference between Christian and Pagan. I
may be a pagan, but I don't like the name; it sounds sectarian. She
thinks me at any rate no better than an ancient Greek. It's the
difference between making the most of life and making the least, so
that you'll get another better one in some other time and place.
Will it be a sin to make the most of that one, too, I wonder; and
shall we have to be bribed off in the future state as well as in the
present? Perhaps I care too much for beauty--I don't know, I doubt
if a poor devil CAN; I delight in it, I adore it, I think of it
continually, I try to produce it, to reproduce it. My wife holds
that we shouldn't cultivate or enjoy it without extraordinary
precautions and reserves. She's always afraid of it, always on her
guard. I don't know what it can ever have done to her, what grudge
it owes her or what resentment rides. And she's so pretty, too,
herself! Don't you think she's lovely? She was at any rate when we
married. At that time I wasn't aware of that difference I speak of--
I thought it all came to the same thing: in the end, as they say.
Well, perhaps it will in the end. I don't know what the end will be.