favourite in London
this season, and win in a canter.

_Coldwaite_. You will excuse me, Mr Rollestone, but I really am
interested, and I really am serious. It was with no idle curiosity that
I was waiting to hear your answer to Mr Germsell's inquiry, as to the
nature of the moral experiment necessary to test the character of this
unseen force.

_Rollestone_. I can only say that any experiment which deals with the
affectional and emotional part of one's nature must be painful in the
extreme. There is, indeed, only one motive which would induce one to
undergo the trials, sufferings, sacrifices, and ordeals which it
involves--and that is one in which you will sympathise: it is the hope
that humanity may benefit by the result of one's efforts. Indeed, any
lower motive than this would vitiate them. I will venture to assert to
Mr Germsell, who is so sceptical as to the existence of any other quality
in that force, which he can only fathom so far as to know that it is
physical, that I will put him through a course of experiment which will
cause him more acute moral suffering than his brain could bear, unless it
was sustained by a force which, by that experimental process, will reveal
attributes contained in it not dreamt of in his philosophy.

_Germsell_. I have no doubt you could strain my mind until it was weak
enough to believe anything, even your fantastic theories. Thank you, I
would rather continue to experiment with my own microscope and forceps
than let you experiment either upon my affections or my brains.

_Fussle_ [_aside to_ Mr Rollestone]. You could not make anything of them
even if he consented--the former don't exist, and the latter are mere
putty--but I can quite understand your desire to begin _in corpore vili_.

_Lord Fondleton_ [_aside to_ Mrs Gloring]. Allow me freely to offer you
my affections as peculiarly adapted to experiments of this nature.

_Rollestone_. It has always struck me as strange that men of science,
who don't shrink from testing, for instance, the value of poisons, or the
nature of disease, by heroically subjecting their own external organisms
to their action, should shrink from experimenting on that essential if
remote vitalising force, which can only be reached by moral experiment,
and disorder in which produces not only moral obliquity and mental
alienation, but physical disease as well.

_Fussle_. Thus a man may die of apoplexy brought on by a fit of passion.
Cure hi