"My uncle has already suggested pork-packing, Sir Thomas."
"Dry-goods! What are American dry-goods?" asked the Duchess, raising her large hands in wonder, and accentuating the verb.
"American novels," answered Lord Henry, helping himself to some quail.
The Duchess looked puzzled.
"Don't mind him, my dear," whispered Lady Agatha. "He never means anything that he says."
"When America was discovered," said the Radical member, and he began to give some wearisome facts.
Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.
The Duchess sighed, and exercised her privilege of interruption.
"I wish to goodness it never had been discovered at all!" she exclaimed. "Really, our girls have no chance nowadays.
It is most unfair."
"Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered," said Mr. Erskine. "I myself would say that it had merely been detected."
"Oh! but I have seen specimens of the inhabitants," answered the Duchess, vaguely. "I must confess that most of them are extremely pretty.
And they dress well, too.
They get all their dresses in Paris.
I wish I could afford to do the same."
"They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris," chuckled Sir Thomas, who had a large wardrobe of Humour's cast-off clothes.
"Really!
And where do bad Americans go to when they die?" inquired the Duchess.
"They go to America," murmured Lord Henry.
Sir Thomas frowned.
"I am afraid that your nephew is prejudiced against that great country," he said to Lady Agatha. "I have travelled all over it, in cars provided by the directors, who, in such matters, are extremely civil. I assure you that it is an education to visit it."
"But must we really see Chicago in order to be educated?" asked Mr. Erskine, plaintively. "I don't feel up to the journey."
Sir Thomas waved his hand.
"Mr. Erskine of Treadley has the world on his shelves.
We practical men like to see things, not to read about them.
The Americans are an extremely interesting people. They are absolutely reasonable.
I think that is their distinguishing characteristic.
Yes, Mr. Erskine, an absolutely reasonable people.
I assure you there is no nonsense about the Americans."
"How dreadful!" cried Lord Henry. "I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable.
There is something unfair about its use.
It is hitting below the intellect."
"I do not understand you," said Sir Thomas, growing rather red.
"I do, Lord Henry," murmured Mr. Erskine, with a smile.
"Paradoxes are all very well in their way...." rejoined the Baronet.
"Was that a paradox?" asked Mr. Erskine. "I did not think so.
Perhaps it was.
Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth.
To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope.
When the Verities become acrobats we can judge them."
"Dear me!" said Lady Agatha, "how you men argue! I am sure I never can make out what you are talking about.
Oh! Harry, I am quite vexed with you.
Why do you try to persuade our nice Mr. Dorian Gray to give up the East End?
I assure you he would be quite invaluable. They would love his playing."
"I want him to play to me," cried Lord Henry, smiling, and he looked down the table and caught a bright answering glance.
"But they are so unhappy in Whitechapel," continued Lady Agatha.
"I can sympathise with everything, except suffering," said Lord Henry, shrugging his shoulders. "I cannot sympathise with that.
It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing.
There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain.
One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life.