I had watched the third cup of
coffee disappear, and duly discussed butter and cheese, wine and cows,
"do you think the world is getting better?" She was slicing a chunk of
bread with her capacious pocket-knife, and stopped short. Her small
bright blue eyes peered at me curiously. "I mean, do you believe there
is real progress--that we are better than we used to be?"

The knife came dancing down on the plate. "Better?" she said; "not at
all; we are worse. Why, when I was young we used constantly to have
processions and carry le Bon Dieu, and I tell you the harvest was
different from what it is now. And the young girls were modest then;
they all wore aprons, and our cure used to insist on them wearing
aprons, for, said he, all women should wear aprons."

"All women should wear aprons," I repeated mechanically, as my thoughts
flitted back to Babylon.

Marie-Joseph saw and misinterpreted my disappointment. "Did you grasp
what I said?" she asked; "there is no modesty nowadays. And you people
who come from England," she added sternly, "with your short skirts and
your peculiar ways, don't improve matters."

I felt duly rebuked, and during the rest of the hour which Marie-Joseph
wasted on me, I sought to re-establish myself in her opinion by
discoursing on the merits of _soupe au fromage_.

We all have our chosen test of moral worth, and perhaps our judgment of
the decline and rise of social virtue is as easily swayed by personal
predilection as was that of Marie-Joseph. To me the persistence of the
same cruel and stupid customs throughout the centuries is a source of
perplexed pessimism. I cannot brush aside the problem by a facile
reference to reincarnation. If John the brigand was a cut-throat and a
robber in his twentieth appearance on this planet, why should he persist
in these idiosyncrasies in his twenty-third return as George the
politician and successful captain of industry? This is not at all a fair
representation of the theory of reincarnation, I shall be told. It is
not, but it is one of those to which we are driven in the desperation
of impatience. A friend of mine, a high authority on matters
theosophical, knows of a potent explanation and anodyne for moral
impatience. Humanity, he tells me, is always being recruited from Mars.
Mars, in spite of its canals, is a low and wicked planet, with a
reptilian population. When the Martians advance a little beyond the
moral status of their fellow-creatures and close