“Material rather than moral,” said Lady Ferrol.
“But in the spirit-worship of my goddess the immorality is immaterial. Besides, if you say that our tastes are always changing, it seems to me that constancy is the essence of my religion.”
“That is a paradox which we shall make you explain,” said Molara.
“Well, you say I change each day, and my goddess changes too. Today I admire one standard of beauty, tomorrow another, but when tomorrow comes I am no longer the same person. The molecular structure of my brain is altered; my ideas have changed; my old self has perished, loving its own ideal; the renovated ego starts life with a new one. It is all a case of wedded till death.”
“You are not going to declare that constancy is a series of changes? You may as well assert that motion is a succession of halts.”
“I am true to the fancy of the hour.”
“You express my views in other words. Beauty depends on human caprice, and changes with the times.”
“Look at that statue,” said Savrola suddenly, indicating a magnificent marble figure of Diana which stood in the middle of the room surrounded by ferns. “More than two thousand years have passed since men called that beautiful. Do we deny it now?” There was no answer and he continued: “That is true beauty of line and form, which is eternal. The other things you have mentioned, fashions, styles, fancies, are but the unsuccessful efforts we make to attain to it. Men call such efforts art. Art is to beauty what honour is to honesty, an unnatural allotropic form. Art and honour belong to gentlemen; beauty and honesty are good enough for men.”
There was a pause. It was impossible to mistake the democratic tone; his earnestness impressed them. Molara looked uneasy. The Ambassador came to the rescue.
“Well, I shall continue to worship the goddess of beauty, whether she be constant or variable”—he looked at the Countess; “and to show my devotion I shall offer up a waltz in that sacred fane, the ballroom.”
He pushed his chair back, and, stooping, picked up his partner’s glove, which had fallen to the floor. Everyone rose, and the party separated. As Savrola walked back to the hall with Lucile, they passed an open doorway leading to the garden. A multitude of fairy lights marked out the flowerbeds or hung in festoons from the trees. The paths were carpeted with red cloth; a cool breeze fanned their faces. Lucile paused.
“It is a lovely night.”
The invitation was plain. She had wanted to speak to him, then, after all. How right he was to come—on constitutional grounds.
“Shall we go out?” he said.
She consented, and they stepped on to the terrace.
VIII
“In the Starlight”
The night was very still. The soft breeze was not strong enough to stir even the slender palms which rose on all sides, and whose outlines, above the surrounding foliage, framed the starlit sky. The palace stood on high ground, and the garden sloped on the western side towards the sea. At the end of the terrace was a stone seat.
“Let us sit here,” said Lucile.
They sat down. The dreamy music of a waltz floated down as a distant accompaniment to their thoughts. The windows of the palace blazed with light and suggested glitter, glare, and heat; in the garden all was quiet and cool.
“Why do you sneer at honour?” asked Lucile, thinking of the interrupted conversation.
“Because it has no true foundation, no ultra-human sanction. Its codes are constantly changing with times and places. At one time it is thought more honourable to kill the man you have wronged than to make amends; at another it is more important to pay a bookmaker than a butcher. Like art it changes with human caprice, and like art it comes from opulence and luxury.”
“But why do you claim a higher origin for beauty and honesty?”
“Because, wherever I have looked, I see that all things are perpetually referred to an eternal standard of fitness, and that right triumphs over wrong, truth over falsehood, beauty over ugliness. ‘Fitness’ is the general expression! Judged by this standard art and honour have little value.”
“But are these things so?” she asked wonderingly. “Surely there are many exceptions?”
“Nature never considers the individual; she only looks at the average fitness of the species. Consider the statistics of mortality. How exact they are: they give to a month the expectation of life to men; and yet they tell a man nothing. We cannot say that a good man will always overcome a knave; but the evolutionist will not hesitate to affirm that the nation with the highest ideals would succeed.”
“Unless,” said Lucile, “some other nation with lower ideals, but stronger arms, intervenes.”
“Well, even then might is a form of fitness; I think a low form, but still physical force contains the elements of human progress. This is only the instance; we must enlarge our view. Nature does not consider the individual species. All we will now assert is that organisms imbued with moral fitness would ultimately rise above those whose virtue is physical. How many times has civilisation, by which I mean a state of society where moral force begins to escape from the tyranny of physical forces, climbed the ladder of Progress and been dragged down? Perhaps many hundred times in this world alone. But the motive power, the upward tendency, was constant. Evolution does not say ‘always,’ but ‘ultimately.’ Well, ultimately civilisation has climbed up beyond the reach of barbarism. The higher ideals have reached the surface by superior buoyancy.”
“Why do you assume that this triumph is permanent? How do you know that it will not be reversed, as all others have been?”
“Because we have got might on our side, as well as moral ascendancy.”
“Perhaps the Romans in the summit of their power thought that too?”
“Very likely, but without reason. They had only their swords to fall back upon as an ultimate appeal; and
