“But please don’t think about writing,” I said, “when you’ve anything more attractive on hand. I delight in reading letters, but I know well how tiring it is to write them.”
“It is, sometimes,” Arthur assented. “For instance, when you’re very shy of the person you have to write to.”
“Does that show itself in the letter?” Lady Muriel enquired. “Of course, when I hear anyone talking—you, for instance—I can see how desperately shy he is! But can you see that in a letter?”
“Well, of course, when you hear anyone talk fluently—you, for instance—you can see how desperately un-shy she is—not to say saucy! But the shyest and most intermittent talker must seem fluent in letter-writing. He may have taken half-an-hour to compose his second sentence; but there it is, close after the first!”
“Then letters don’t express all that they might express?”
“That’s merely because our system of letter-writing is incomplete. A shy writer ought to be able to show that he is so. Why shouldn’t he make pauses in writing, just as he would do in speaking? He might leave blank spaces—say half a page at a time. And a very shy girl—if there is such a thing—might write a sentence on the first sheet of her letter—then put in a couple of blank sheets—then a sentence on the fourth sheet: and so on.”
“I quite foresee that we—I mean this clever little boy and myself—” Lady Muriel said to me, evidently with the kind wish to bring me into the conversation, “—are going to become famous—of course all our inventions are common property now—for a new Code of Rules for Letter-writing! Please invent some more, little boy!”
“Well, another thing greatly needed, little girl, is some way of expressing that we don’t mean anything.”
“Explain yourself, little boy! Surely you can find no difficulty in expressing a total absence of meaning?”
“I mean that you should be able, when you don’t mean a thing to be taken seriously, to express that wish. For human nature is so constituted that whatever you write seriously is taken as a joke, and whatever you mean as a joke is taken seriously! At any rate, it is so in writing to a lady!”
“Ah! you’re not used to writing to ladies!” Lady Muriel remarked, leaning back in her chair, and gazing thoughtfully into the sky. “You should try.”
“Very good,” said Arthur. “How many ladies may I begin writing to? As many as I can count on the fingers of both hands?”
“As many as you can count on the thumbs of one hand!” his ladylove replied with much severity. “What a very naughty little boy he is! Isn’t he?” (with an appealing glance at me).
“He’s a little fractious,” I said. “Perhaps he’s cutting a tooth.” While to myself I said “How exactly like Sylvie talking to Bruno!”
“He wants his tea.” (The naughty little boy volunteered the information.) “He’s getting very tired, at the mere prospect of the great party tomorrow!”
“Then he shall have a good rest beforehand!” she soothingly replied. “The tea isn’t made yet. Come, little boy, lean well back in your chair, and think about nothing—or about me, whichever you prefer!”
“All the same, all the same!” Arthur sleepily murmured, watching her with loving eyes, as she moved her chair away to the tea table, and began to make the tea. “Then he’ll wait for his tea, like a good, patient little boy!”
“Shall I bring you the London Papers?” said Lady Muriel. “I saw them lying on the table as I came out, but my father said there was nothing in them, except that horrid murder-trial.” (Society was just then enjoying its daily thrill of excitement in studying the details of a specially sensational murder in a thieves’ den in the East of London.)
“I have no appetite for horrors,” Arthur replied. “But I hope we have learned the lesson they should teach us—though we are very apt to read it backwards!”
“You speak in riddles,” said Lady Muriel. “Please explain yourself. See now,” suiting the action to the word, “I am sitting at your feet, just as if you were a second Gamaliel! Thanks, no.” (This was to me, who had risen to bring her chair back to its former place.) “Pray don’t disturb yourself. This tree and the grass make a very nice easy-chair. What is the lesson that one always reads wrong?”
Arthur was silent for a minute. “I would like to be clear what it is I mean,” he said, slowly and thoughtfully, “before I say anything to you—because you think about it.”
Anything approaching to a compliment was so unusual an utterance for Arthur, that it brought a flush of pleasure to her cheek, as she replied “It is you, that give me the ideas to think about.”
“One’s first thought,” Arthur proceeded, “in reading of anything specially vile or barbarous, as done by a fellow-creature, is apt to be that we see a new depth of Sin revealed beneath us: and we seem to gaze down into that abyss from some higher ground, far apart from it.”
“I think I understand you now. You mean that one ought to think—not ‘God, I thank Thee that I am not as other men are’—but ‘God, be merciful to me also, who might be, but for Thy grace, a sinner as vile as he!’ ”
“No,” said Arthur. “I meant a great deal more than that.”
She looked up quickly, but checked herself, and waited in silence.
“One must begin further back, I think. Think of some other man, the same age as this poor wretch. Look back to the time when they both began life—before they had sense enough to know Right from Wrong. Then, at any rate, they were equal in God’s sight?”
She nodded assent.
“We have, then, two distinct epochs at which we may contemplate the two men whose lives we are comparing. At the first epoch they are, so far as moral responsibility is concerned, on precisely the same footing: they are
