hroughout the interview Cornelia had maintained a triumphant
posture, superior to Arabella's skill in fencing, seeing that it exposed
no weak point of the defence by making an attack, and concealed
especially the confession implied by a relish for the conflict. Her
sisters considerately left her to recover herself, after this mighty
exercise of silence.

CHAPTER XXII

Cornelia sat with a clenched hand. "You are rich and he is poor," was the
keynote of her thoughts, repeated from minute to minute. "And it is gold
gives you the right in the world's eye to despise him!" she apostrophized
the vanished Laura, clothing gold with all the baseness of that person.
Now, when one really hates gold, one is at war with one's fellows. The
tide sets that way. There is no compromise: to hate it is to try to stem
the flood. It happens that this is one of the temptations of the
sentimentalist, who should reflect, but does not, that the fine feelers
by which the iniquities of gold are so keenly discerned, are a growth due
to it, nevertheless. Those 'fine feelers,' or antennae of the senses,
come of sweet ease; that is synonymous with gold in our island-latitude.
The sentimentalists are represented by them among the civilized species.
It is they that sensitively touch and reject, touch and select; whereby
the laws of the polite world are ultimately regulated, and civilization
continually advanced, sometimes ridiculously. The sentimentalists are
ahead of us, not by weight of brain, but through delicacy of nerve, and,
like all creatures in the front, they are open to be victims. I pray you
to observe again the shrinking life that afflicts the adventurous horns
of the snail, for example. Such are the sentimentalists to us--the fat
body of mankind. We owe them much, and though they scorn us, let us pity
them.

Especially when they are young they deserve pity, for they suffer
cruelly. I for my part prefer to see boys and girls led into the ways of
life by nature; but I admit that in many cases, in most cases, our good
mother has not (occupied as her hands must be) made them perfectly
presentable; by which fact I am warned to have tolerance for the finer
beings who labour under these excessive sensual subtleties. I perceive
their uses. And they are right good comedy; for which I may say that I
almost love them. Man is the laughing animal: and at the end of an
infinite search, the philosopher finds himself clinging to laughter as
the bes