"You never asked me," she answered. "'A dumb priest loses his benefice.' But I was speaking of my club. We studied Andersen all winter, and got enough more out of him than a lot of us who pored over Ibsen, guided by a literary expert. Andersen has a more beautiful, a more inspiring philosophy. Every nation has its story of Psyche, the lost soul of things, but none is more beautiful than the tale of Gerda and Kay. There were children in that club who were cruel, horribly cruel, and one day when we gave an entertainment for them, one of the older girls recited the story of 'The Daisy and the Lark.' They cried as I had cried over it years before."
"I remember," he said. "It broke my heart when I was a little shaver. I couldn't give so sad a story as that to a child."
"Oh, yes, you could," she said, "if the child needed it. The world was cruel, cruel, Adam; I used to wonder sometimes why God did not blot it all out, as He has blotted it out now. Once in another club, a big, swell affair, there was a Humane Society programme. One woman, in a Persian lamb jacket, spoke on the evils of the overcheck; you know how they get that wool? And women nodded the aigrettes in their bonnets, torn from the old birds while the little ones starved to death, to show their approval, and patted their hands gloved in the skins of kids, sewed in cloth soon after their birth so they couldn't grow a fleece, and tortured all their short lives, and went home to eat pâté-de-foie gras, and broil live lobsters, thanking God they were not as the rest of men, if only they let out their check-reins a hole or so. It was horrible,--the cruelties men practised to gratify appetite, and that women were guilty of for vanity. I suppose I am a monomaniac on the subject, but we never seemed far removed from barbarians, when we went clothed in the skins of wild animals, and decorated with their heads and tails and feathers, like so many Sioux chiefs. The varnish of civilization isn't dry on us yet. Why, if a ship should come here now, do you know what they would do first, unless they happened to be East Indians? They would say they wanted some fresh meat, and offer to buy Lily; she is the fattest of the cows. If we wouldn't sell her, they would probably take her anyway."