rlt
should be vhat they gall imbrober. Look at Arisdophanes; look at Jaucer;
look at the "Gontes Troladigues"; look at the "Tegameron."'

'Look at Pickwick,' said Paul.

'Vell!' cried Darco, 'look at Bigvig. Bigvig woult haf peen a creat teal
vunnier if Tickens had lived at the dime of Zmollet.'

'I don't mind drinking out of a jug,' said Paul, 'but I like a clean
jug. I've read Aristophanes--in translation. It's like drinking wine out
of a gold cup that has been washed in a sewer.'

'Who says that?' asked Darco.

'I do,' said Paul.

'It is a ferry coot ebicram,' said Darco. 'I vill rememper id. But,
mindt you, to be squeamish is not to be glean-minded.

If a sdory is vunny, I laugh. Vy not? If a man tells me a sdory that is
only dirdy, I co someveres else. I am a goot man. For dwendy-three hours
and fifty-eight minutes in a tay I am as bure-minded as a child; then,
in the ott dwo minutes somepoty tells me a dirdy sdory. I laugh, and I
go avay, and I think of my blays and my boedry and my pusiness. It is
water on a duck's pack.'

'Dirty water,' said Paul.

'There is enough glean water in the tay's rainfall to wash it off,'
Darco answered. 'Did you efer read "The Orichinal"?

'No,' said Paul.

'The man who wrote it vos so healthy that he nefer hat need to wash
himself. His skin was too bure to hold dirt.'

'Filthy beggar!' said Paul.

'I make it a baraple,' Darco declared. 'Id is true of the immordal soul.
I am as bure-minded as a child, and I haf heardt den thousand fillainous
sdories. Vot does it madder?'

The rivets of Paul's armour rotted, as the rivets of most men's armour
rot, and he grew to tolerate what had been abominable. And that is the
way of life, which is a series of declensions from high ideals, and is
meant to be so because things must be lost before their worth can be
known. The society in which he lived and moved was as rich as any in the
world in the kind of narrative he had discussed with Darco. Little by
little he got to take Darco's view. It is the view of ninety per
cent, of men of the world. A naturally pure mind never learns to love
nastiness, but it learns to tolerate it, for the sake of the wit which
sometimes lives with it.

Darco was a man whom nobody ever saw for an instant under the influence
of liquor, but then it was impossible to make him drunk. It seemed to
Paul as if it were just as unlikely for him to become intoxicated by
drinking as for a decanter to grow tipsy b