Chương Chương 7 · 第3章（3）

THE STATUE. You would have slain yourself in your blind efforts to fence

but for my foot slipping, my friend.

DON JUAN. Audacious ribald: your laughter will finish in hideous boredom

before morning.

THE STATUE. Ha ha! Do you remember how I frightened you when I said

something like that to you from my pedestal in Seville? It sounds rather

flat without my trombones.

DON JUAN. They tell me it generally sounds flat with them, Commander.

ANA. Oh, do not interrupt with these frivolities, father. Is there

nothing in Heaven but contemplation, Juan?

DON JUAN. In the Heaven I seek, no other joy. But there is the work of

helping Life in its struggle upward. Think of how it wastes and scatters

itself, how it raises up obstacles to itself and destroys itself in its

ignorance and blindness. It needs a brain, this irresistible force, lest

in its ignorance it should resist itself. What a piece of work is man!

says the poet. Yes: but what a blunderer! Here is the highest miracle of

organization yet attained by life, the most intensely alive thing that

exists, the most conscious of all the organisms; and yet, how wretched

are his brains! Stupidity made sordid and cruel by the realities learnt

from toil and poverty: Imagination resolved to starve sooner than face

these realities, piling up illusions to hide them, and calling itself

cleverness, genius! And each accusing the other of its own defect:

Stupidity accusing Imagination of folly, and Imagination accusing

Stupidity of ignorance: whereas, alas! Stupidity has all the knowledge,

and Imagination all the intelligence.

THE DEVIL. And a pretty kettle of fish they make of it between them. Did

I not say, when I was arranging that affair of Faust's, that all Man's

reason has done for him is to make him beastlier than any beast. One

splendid body is worth the brains of a hundred dyspeptic, flatulent

philosophers.

DON JUAN. You forget that brainless magnificence of body has been tried.

Things immeasurably greater than man in every respect but brain have

existed and perished. The megatherium, the icthyosaurus have paced the

earth with seven-league steps and hidden the day with cloud vast wings.

Where are they now? Fossils in museums, and so few and imperfect at

that, that a knuckle bone or a tooth of one of them is prized beyond the

lives of a thousand soldiers. These things lived and wanted to live; but

for lack of brains they did not know how to carry out their purpose, and

so destroyed themselves.

THE DEVIL. And is Man any the less destroying himself for all this

boasted brain of his? Have you walked up and down upon the earth lately?

I have; and I have examined Man's wonderful inventions. And I tell you

that in the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death

he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all

the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. The peasant I tempt

to-day eats and drinks what was eaten and drunk by the peasants of ten

thousand years ago; and the house he lives in has not altered as much

in a thousand centuries as the fashion of a lady's bonnet in a score of

weeks. But when he goes out to slay, he carries a marvel of mechanism

that lets loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden molecular

energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe of his fathers

far behind. In the arts of peace Man is a bungler. I have seen his

cotton factories and the like, with machinery that a greedy dog could

have invented if it had wanted money instead of food. I know his clumsy

typewriters and bungling locomotives and tedious bicycles: they are toys

compared to the Maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat. There is nothing

in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in

his weapons. This marvellous force of Life of which you boast is a force

of Death: Man measures his strength by his destructiveness. What is

his religion? An excuse for hating ME. What is his law? An excuse for

hanging YOU. What is his morality? Gentility! an excuse for consuming

without producing. What is his art? An excuse for gloating over pictures

of slaughter. What are his politics? Either the worship of a despot

because a despot can kill, or parliamentary cockfighting. I spent an

evening lately in a certain celebrated legislature, and heard the

pot lecturing the kettle for its blackness, and ministers answering

questions. When I left I chalked up on the door the old nursery

saying--"Ask no questions and you will be told no lies." I bought a

sixpenny family magazine, and found it full of pictures of young men

shooting and stabbing one another. I saw a man die: he was a London

bricklayer's laborer with seven children. He left seventeen pounds

club money; and his wife spent it all on his funeral and went into

the workhouse with the children next day. She would not have spent

sevenpence on her children's schooling: the law had to force her to let

them be taught gratuitously; but on death she spent all she had. Their

imagination glows, their energies rise up at the idea of death, these

people: they love it; and the more horrible it is the more they enjoy

it. Hell is a place far above their comprehension: they derive their

notion of it from two of the greatest fools that ever lived, an Italian

and an Englishman. The Italian described it as a place of mud, frost,

filth, fire, and venomous serpents: all torture. This ass, when he was

not lying about me, was maundering about some woman whom he saw once in

the street. The Englishman described me as being expelled from Heaven

by cannons and gunpowder; and to this day every Briton believes that

the whole of his silly story is in the Bible. What else he says I do not

know; for it is all in a long poem which neither I nor anyone else ever

succeeded in wading through. It is the same in everything. The highest

form of literature is the tragedy, a play in which everybody is

murdered at the end. In the old chronicles you read of earthquakes and

pestilences, and are told that these showed the power and majesty of God

and the littleness of Man. Nowadays the chronicles describe battles.

In a battle two bodies of men shoot at one another with bullets and

explosive shells until one body runs away, when the others chase the

fugitives on horseback and cut them to pieces as they fly. And this, the

chronicle concludes, shows the greatness and majesty of empires, and the

littleness of the vanquished. Over such battles the people run about

the streets yelling with delight, and egg their Governments on to spend

hundreds of millions of money in the slaughter, whilst the strongest

Ministers dare not spend an extra penny in the pound against the poverty

and pestilence through which they themselves daily walk. I could give

you a thousand instances; but they all come to the same thing: the power

that governs the earth is not the power of Life but of Death; and the

inner need that has nerved Life to the effort of organizing itself into

the human being is not the need for higher life but for a more efficient

engine of destruction. The plague, the famine, the earthquake, the

tempest were too spasmodic in their action; the tiger and crocodile were

too easily satiated and not cruel enough: something more constantly,

more ruthlessly, more ingeniously destructive was needed; and that

something was Man, the inventor of the rack, the stake, the gallows,

and the electrocutor; of the sword and gun; above all, of justice, duty,

patriotism and all the other isms by which even those who are clever

enough to be humanely disposed are persuaded to become the most

destructive of all the destroyers.

DON JUAN. Pshaw! all this is old. Your weak side, my diabolic friend,

is that you have always been a gull: you take Man at his own valuation.

Nothing would flatter him more than your opinion of him. He loves to

think of himself as bold and bad. He is neither one nor the other: he

is only a coward. Call him tyrant, murderer, pirate, bully; and he will

adore you, and swagger about with the consciousness of having the blood

of the old sea kings in his veins. Call him liar and thief; and he will

only take an action against you for libel. But call him coward; and

he will go mad with rage: he will face death to outface that stinging

truth. Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for

his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is

his cowardice. Yet all his civilization is founded on his cowardice, on

his abject tameness, which he calls his respectability. There are limits

to what a mule or an ass will stand; but Man will suffer himself to be

degraded until his vileness becomes so loathsome to his oppressors that

they themselves are forced to reform it.

THE DEVIL. Precisely. And these are the creatures in whom you discover

what you call a Life Force!

DON JUAN. Yes; for now comes the most surprising part of the whole

business.

THE STATUE. What's that?

DON JUAN. Why, that you can make any of these cowards brave by simply

putting an idea into his head.

THE STATUE. Stuff! As an old soldier I admit the cowardice: it's as

universal as sea sickness, and matters just as little. But that about

putting an idea into a man's head is stuff and nonsense. In a battle all

you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that

it's more dangerous to lose than to win.

DON JUAN. That is perhaps why battles are so useless. But men never

really overcome fear until they imagine they are fighting to further a

universal purpose--fighting for an idea, as they call it. Why was the

Crusader braver than the pirate? Because he fought, not for himself, but

for the Cross. What force was it that met him with a valor as reckless

as his own? The force of men who fought, not for themselves, but for

Islam. They took Spain from us, though we were fighting for our very

hearths and homes; but when we, too, fought for that mighty idea, a

Catholic Church, we swept them back to Africa.

THE DEVIL. [ironically] What! you a Catholic, Senor Don Juan! A devotee!

My congratulations.

THE STATUE. [seriously] Come come! as a soldier, I can listen to nothing

against the Church.

DON JUAN. Have no fear, Commander: this idea of a Catholic Church will

survive Islam, will survive the Cross, will survive even that vulgar

pageant of incompetent schoolboyish gladiators which you call the Army.

THE STATUE. Juan: you will force me to call you to account for this.

DON JUAN. Useless: I cannot fence. Every idea for which Man will die

will be a Catholic idea. When the Spaniard learns at last that he is no

better than the Saracen, and his prophet no better than Mahomet, he will

arise, more Catholic than ever, and die on a barricade across the filthy

slum he starves in, for universal liberty and equality.

THE STATUE. Bosh!

DON JUAN. What you call bosh is the only thing men dare die for.

Later on, Liberty will not be Catholic enough: men will die for human

perfection, to which they will sacrifice all their liberty gladly.

THE DEVIL. Ay: they will never be at a loss for an excuse for killing

one another.

DON JUAN. What of that? It is not death that matters, but the fear of

death. It is not killing and dying that degrade us, but base living, and

accepting the wages and profits of degradation. Better ten dead men than

one live slave or his master. Men shall yet rise up, father against son

and brother against brother, and kill one another for the great Catholic

idea of abolishing slavery.

THE DEVIL. Yes, when the Liberty and Equality of which you prate shall

have made free white Christians cheaper in the labor market than by

auction at the block.

DON JUAN. Never fear! the white laborer shall have his turn too. But

I am not now defending the illusory forms the great ideas take. I am

giving you examples of the fact that this creature Man, who in his own

selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like

a hero. He may be abject as a citizen; but he is dangerous as a fanatic.

He can only be enslaved whilst he is spiritually weak enough to listen

to reason. I tell you, gentlemen, if you can show a man a piece of what

he now calls God's work to do, and what he will later on call by many

new names, you can make him entirely reckless of the consequences to

himself personally.

ANA. Yes: he shirks all his responsibilities, and leaves his wife to

grapple with them.

THE STATUE. Well said, daughter. Do not let him talk you out of your

common sense.

THE DEVIL. Alas! Senor Commander, now that we have got on to the subject

of Woman, he will talk more than ever. However, I confess it is for me

the one supremely interesting subject.

DON JUAN. To a woman, Senora, man's duties and responsibilities begin

and end with the task of getting bread for her children. To her, Man is

only a means to the end of getting children and rearing them.

ANA. Is that your idea of a woman's mind? I call it cynical and

disgusting materialism.

DON JUAN. Pardon me, Ana: I said nothing about a woman's whole mind. I

spoke of her view of Man as a separate sex. It is no more cynical than

her view of herself as above all things a Mother. Sexually, Woman is

Nature's contrivance for perpetuating its highest achievement. Sexually,

Man is Woman's contrivance for fulfilling Nature's behest in the most

economical way. She knows by instinct that far back in the evolutional

process she invented him, differentiated him, created him in order to

produce something better than the single-sexed process can produce.

Whilst he fulfils the purpose for which she made him, he is welcome to

his dreams, his follies, his ideals, his heroisms, provided that the

keystone of them all is the worship of woman, of motherhood, of the

family, of the hearth. But how rash and dangerous it was to invent a

separate creature whose sole function was her own impregnation! For mark

what has happened. First, Man has multiplied on her hands until there

are as many men as women; so that she has been unable to employ for her

purposes more than a fraction of the immense energy she has left at

his disposal by saving him the exhausting labor of gestation. This

superfluous energy has gone to his brain and to his muscle. He has

become too strong to be controlled by her bodily, and too imaginative

and mentally vigorous to be content with mere self-reproduction. He has

created civilization without consulting her, taking her domestic labor

for granted as the foundation of it.

ANA. THAT is true, at all events.

THE DEVIL. Yes; and this civilization! what is it, after all?

DON JUAN. After all, an excellent peg to hang your cynical commonplaces

on; but BEFORE all, it is an attempt on Man's part to make himself

something more than the mere instrument of Woman's purpose. So far, the

result of Life's continual effort not only to maintain itself, but to

achieve higher and higher organization and completer self-consciousness,

is only, at best, a doubtful campaign between its forces and those of

Death and Degeneration. The battles in this campaign are mere blunders,

mostly won, like actual military battles, in spite of the commanders.

THE STATUE. That is a dig at me. No matter: go on, go on.

DON JUAN. It is a dig at a much higher power than you, Commander. Still,

you must have noticed in your profession that even a stupid general can

win battles when the enemy's general is a little stupider.

THE STATUE. [very seriously] Most true, Juan, most true. Some donkeys

have amazing luck.

DON JUAN. Well, the Life Force is stupid; but it is not so stupid as the

forces of Death and Degeneration. Besides, these are in its pay all

the time. And so Life wins, after a fashion. What mere copiousness of

fecundity can supply and mere greed preserve, we possess. The survival

of whatever form of civilization can produce the best rifle and the best

fed riflemen is assured.

THE DEVIL. Exactly! the survival, not of the most effective means of

Life but of the most effective means of Death. You always come back to

my point, in spite of your wrigglings and evasions and sophistries, not

to mention the intolerable length of your speeches.

DON JUAN. Oh come! who began making long speeches? However, if I overtax

your intellect, you can leave us and seek the society of love and beauty

and the rest of your favorite boredoms.

THE DEVIL. [much offended] This is not fair, Don Juan, and not civil. I

am also on the intellectual plane. Nobody can appreciate it more than

I do. I am arguing fairly with you, and, I think, utterly refuting you.

Let us go on for another hour if you like.

DON JUAN. Good: let us.

THE STATUE. Not that I see any prospect of your coming to any point in

particular, Juan. Still, since in this place, instead of merely killing

time we have to kill eternity, go ahead by all means.

DON JUAN. [somewhat impatiently] My point, you marbleheaded old

masterpiece, is only a step ahead of you. Are we agreed that Life is a

force which has made innumerable experiments in organizing itself; that

the mammoth and the man, the mouse and the megatherium, the flies and

the fleas and the Fathers of the Church, are all more or less successful

attempts to build up that raw force into higher and higher individuals,

the ideal individual being omnipotent, omniscient, infallible, and

withal completely, unilludedly self-conscious: in short, a god?

THE DEVIL. I agree, for the sake of argument.

THE STATUE. I agree, for the sake of avoiding argument.

ANA. I most emphatically disagree as regards the Fathers of the Church;

and I must beg you not to drag them into the argument.

DON JUAN. I did so purely for the sake of alliteration, Ana; and I

shall make no further allusion to them. And now, since we are, with that

exception, agreed so far, will you not agree with me further that Life

has not measured the success of its attempts at godhead by the beauty or

bodily perfection of the result, since in both these respects the birds,

as our friend Aristophanes long ago pointed out, are so extraordinarily

superior, with their power of flight and their lovely plumage, and,

may I add, the touching poetry of their loves and nestings, that it is

inconceivable that Life, having once produced them, should, if love

and beauty were her object, start off on another line and labor at the

clumsy elephant and the hideous ape, whose grandchildren we are?

ANA. Aristophanes was a heathen; and you, Juan, I am afraid, are very

little better.

THE DEVIL. You conclude, then, that Life was driving at clumsiness and

ugliness?

DON JUAN. No, perverse devil that you are, a thousand times no. Life

was driving at brains--at its darling object: an organ by which it can

attain not only self-consciousness but self-understanding.

THE STATUE. This is metaphysics, Juan. Why the devil should--[to the

Devil] I BEG your pardon.

THE DEVIL. Pray don't mention it. I have always regarded the use of my

name to secure additional emphasis as a high compliment to me. It is

quite at your service, Commander.

THE STATUE. Thank you: that's very good of you. Even in heaven, I never

quite got out of my old military habits of speech. What I was going to

ask Juan was why Life should bother itself about getting a brain. Why

should it want to understand itself? Why not be content to enjoy itself?

DON JUAN. Without a brain, Commander, you would enjoy yourself without

knowing it, and so lose all the fun.

THE STATUE. True, most true. But I am quite content with brain enough to

know that I'm enjoying myself. I don't want to understand why. In

fact, I'd rather not. My experience is that one's pleasures don't bear

thinking about.

DON JUAN. That is why intellect is so unpopular. But to Life, the force

behind the Man, intellect is a necessity, because without it he blunders

into death. Just as Life, after ages of struggle, evolved that wonderful

bodily organ the eye, so that the living organism could see where it

was going and what was coming to help or threaten it, and thus avoid

a thousand dangers that formerly slew it, so it is evolving to-day a

mind's eye that shall see, not the physical world, but the purpose of

Life, and thereby enable the individual to work for that purpose instead

of thwarting and baffling it by setting up shortsighted personal aims as

at present. Even as it is, only one sort of man has ever been happy, has

ever been universally respected among all the conflicts of interests and

illusions.

THE STATUE. You mean the military man.

DON JUAN. Commander: I do not mean the military man. When the military

man approaches, the world locks up its spoons and packs off its

womankind. No: I sing, not arms and the hero, but the philosophic man:

he who seeks in contemplation to discover the inner will of the world,

in invention to discover the means of fulfilling that will, and in

action to do that will by the so-discovered means. Of all other sorts

of men I declare myself tired. They're tedious failures. When I was on

earth, professors of all sorts prowled round me feeling for an unhealthy

spot in me on which they could fasten. The doctors of medicine bade me

consider what I must do to save my body, and offered me quack cures for

imaginary diseases. I replied that I was not a hypochondriac; so they

called me Ignoramus and went their way. The doctors of divinity bade

me consider what I must do to save my soul; but I was not a spiritual

hypochondriac any more than a bodily one, and would not trouble myself

about that either; so they called me Atheist and went their way. After

them came the politician, who said there was only one purpose in Nature,

and that was to get him into parliament. I told him I did not care

whether he got into parliament or not; so he called me Mugwump and went

his way. Then came the romantic man, the Artist, with his love songs and

his paintings and his poems; and with him I had great delight for many

years, and some profit; for I cultivated my senses for his sake; and

his songs taught me to hear better, his paintings to see better, and

his poems to feel more deeply. But he led me at last into the worship of

Woman.

ANA. Juan!

DON JUAN. Yes: I came to believe that in her voice was all the music of

the song, in her face all the beauty of the painting, and in her soul

all the emotion of the poem.

ANA. And you were disappointed, I suppose. Well, was it her fault that

you attributed all these perfections to her?

DON JUAN. Yes, partly. For with a wonderful instinctive cunning, she

kept silent and allowed me to glorify her; to mistake my own visions,

thoughts, and feelings for hers. Now my friend the romantic man was

often too poor or too timid to approach those women who were beautiful

or refined enough to seem to realize his ideal; and so he went to his

grave believing in his dream. But I was more favored by nature and

circumstance. I was of noble birth and rich; and when my person did

not please, my conversation flattered, though I generally found myself

fortunate in both.

THE STATUE. Coxcomb!

DON JUAN. Yes; but even my coxcombry pleased. Well, I found that when I

had touched a woman's imagination, she would allow me to persuade myself

that she loved me; but when my suit was granted she never said "I am

happy: my love is satisfied": she always said, first, "At last, the

barriers are down," and second, "When will you come again?"

ANA. That is exactly what men say.

DON JUAN. I protest I never said it. But all women say it. Well, these

two speeches always alarmed me; for the first meant that the lady's

impulse had been solely to throw down my fortifications and gain my

citadel; and the second openly announced that henceforth she regarded me

as her property, and counted my time as already wholly at her disposal.

THE DEVIL. That is where your want of heart came in.

THE STATUE. [shaking his head] You shouldn't repeat what a woman says,

Juan.

ANA. [severely] It should be sacred to you.

THE STATUE. Still, they certainly do always say it. I never minded the

barriers; but there was always a slight shock about the other, unless

one was very hard hit indeed.

DON JUAN. Then the lady, who had been happy and idle enough before,

became anxious, preoccupied with me, always intriguing, conspiring,

pursuing, watching, waiting, bent wholly on making sure of her prey--I

being the prey, you understand. Now this was not what I had bargained

for. It may have been very proper and very natural; but it was not

music, painting, poetry and joy incarnated in a beautiful woman. I ran

away from it. I ran away from it very often: in fact I became famous for

running away from it.

ANA. Infamous, you mean.

DON JUAN. I did not run away from you. Do you blame me for running away

from the others?

ANA. Nonsense, man. You are talking to a woman of 77 now. If you had had

the chance, you would have run away from me too--if I had let you. You

would not have found it so easy with me as with some of the others. If

men will not be faithful to their home and their duties, they must be

made to be. I daresay you all want to marry lovely incarnations of music

and painting and poetry. Well, you can't have them, because they

don't exist. If flesh and blood is not good enough for you you must

go without: that's all. Women have to put up with flesh-and-blood

husbands--and little enough of that too, sometimes; and you will have to

put up with flesh-and-blood wives. The Devil looks dubious. The Statue

makes a wry face. I see you don't like that, any of you; but it's true,

for all that; so if you don't like it you can lump it.

DON JUAN. My dear lady, you have put my whole case against romance into

a few sentences. That is just why I turned my back on the romantic man

with the artist nature, as he called his infatuation. I thanked him

for teaching me to use my eyes and ears; but I told him that his beauty

worshipping and happiness hunting and woman idealizing was not worth a

dump as a philosophy of life; so he called me Philistine and went his

way.

ANA. It seems that Woman taught you something, too, with all her

defects.

DON JUAN. She did more: she interpreted all the other teaching for me.

Ah, my friends, when the barriers were down for the first time, what

an astounding illumination! I had been prepared for infatuation, for

intoxication, for all the illusions of love's young dream; and lo! never

was my perception clearer, nor my criticism more ruthless. The most

jealous rival of my mistress never saw every blemish in her more keenly

than I. I was not duped: I took her without chloroform.

ANA. But you did take her.

DON JUAN. That was the revelation. Up to that moment I had never lost

the sense of being my own master; never consciously taken a single step

until my reason had examined and approved it. I had come to believe that

I was a purely rational creature: a thinker! I said, with the foolish

philosopher, "I think; therefore I am." It was Woman who taught me to

say "I am; therefore I think." And also "I would think more; therefore I

must be more."

THE STATUE. This is extremely abstract and metaphysical, Juan. If you

would stick to the concrete, and put your discoveries in the form

of entertaining anecdotes about your adventures with women, your

conversation would be easier to follow.

DON JUAN. Bah! what need I add? Do you not understand that when I stood

face to face with Woman, every fibre in my clear critical brain warned

me to spare her and save myself. My morals said No. My conscience said

No. My chivalry and pity for her said No. My prudent regard for myself

said No. My ear, practised on a thousand songs and symphonies; my eye,

exercised on a thousand paintings; tore her voice, her features, her

color to shreds. I caught all those tell-tale resemblances to her father

and mother by which I knew what she would be like in thirty years time.

I noted the gleam of gold from a dead tooth in the laughing mouth: I

made curious observations of the strange odors of the chemistry of the

nerves. The visions of my romantic reveries, in which I had trod the

plains of heaven with a deathless, ageless creature of coral and ivory,

deserted me in that supreme hour. I remembered them and desperately

strove to recover their illusion; but they now seemed the emptiest of

inventions: my judgment was not to be corrupted: my brain still said No

on every issue. And whilst I was in the act of framing my excuse to the

lady, Life seized me and threw me into her arms as a sailor throws a

scrap of fish into the mouth of a seabird.

THE STATUE. You might as well have gone without thinking such a lot

about it, Juan. You are like all the clever men: you have more brains

than is good for you.

THE DEVIL. And were you not the happier for the experience, Senor Don

Juan?

DON JUAN. The happier, no: the wiser, yes. That moment introduced me for

the first time to myself, and, through myself, to the world. I saw then

how useless it is to attempt to impose conditions on the irresistible

force of Life; to preach prudence, careful selection, virtue, honor,

chastity--

ANA. Don Juan: a word against chastity is an insult to me.

DON JUAN. I say nothing against your chastity, Senora, since it took the

form of a husband and twelve children. What more could you have done had

you been the most abandoned of women?

ANA. I could have had twelve husbands and no children that's what I

could have done, Juan. And let me tell you that that would have made all

the difference to the earth which I replenished.

THE STATUE. Bravo Ana! Juan: you are floored, quelled, annihilated.

DON JUAN. No; for though that difference is the true essential

difference--Dona Ana has, I admit, gone straight to the real point--yet

it is not a difference of love or chastity, or even constancy; for

twelve children by twelve different husbands would have replenished the

earth perhaps more effectively. Suppose my friend Ottavio had died when

you were thirty, you would never have remained a widow: you were too

beautiful. Suppose the successor of Ottavio had died when you were

forty, you would still have been irresistible; and a woman who marries

twice marries three times if she becomes free to do so. Twelve lawful

children borne by one highly respectable lady to three different fathers

is not impossible nor condemned by public opinion. That such a lady may

be more law abiding than the poor girl whom we used to spurn into the

gutter for bearing one unlawful infant is no doubt true; but dare you

say she is less self-indulgent?