silly!

CHAPTER XII

LITANY OF EXHORTATIONS

I thought I'd better turn over a new leaf, and start a new chapter.
The intention of the last chapter was to find a way out of the vicious
circle. And it ended in poison-gas.

Yes, dear reader, so it did. But you've not silenced me yet, for all
that.

We're in a nasty mess. We're in a vicious circle. And we're making a
careful study of poison-gases. The secret of Greek fire was lost long
ago, when the world left off being wonderful and ideal. Now it is
wonderful and ideal again, much wonderfuller and _much_ more ideal. So
we ought to do something rare in the way of poison-gas. London a
Pompeii in five minutes! How to outdo Vesuvius!--title of a new book
by American authors.

There is only one single other thing to do. And it's more difficult
than poison-gas. It is to leave off loving. It is to leave off
benevolenting and having a good will. It is to cease utterly. Just
leave off. Oh, parents, see that your children get their dinners and
clean sheets, but don't love them. Don't love them one single grain,
and don't let anybody else love them. Give them their dinners and
leave them alone. You've already loved them to perdition. Now leave
them alone, to find their own way out.

Wives, don't love your husbands any more: even if they cry for it, the
great babies! Sing: "I've had enough of that old sauce." And leave off
loving them or caring for them one single bit. Don't even hate them or
dislike them. Don't have any stew with them at all. Just boil the eggs
and fill the salt-cellars and be quite nice, and in your own soul, be
alone and be still. Be alone, and be still, preserving all the human
decencies, and abandoning the indecency of desires and benevolencies
and devotions, those beastly poison-gas apples of the Sodom vine of
the love-will.

Wives, don't love your husbands nor your children nor anybody. Sit
still, and say Hush! And while you shake the duster out of the
drawing-room window, say to yourself--"In the sweetness of solitude."
And when your husband comes in and says he's afraid he's got a cold
and is going to have double pneumonia, say quietly "surely not." And
if he wants the ammoniated quinine, give it him if he can't get it for
himself. But don't let him drive you out of your solitude, your
singleness within yourself. And if your little boy falls down the
steps and makes his mouth bleed, nurse and comfort him, but say to
yourself, even while yo