bauch, and never
strain excess till we sink into the slough of satiety, shall "animalism"
be a word to designate all that men and women dare to do? "Animalism!"
You ought to blush for such a libel on our innocent and reasonable lives
when you regard your own! You men who scorch your throats with alcohols,
and kill your lives with absinthe; and squander your gold in the
Kursaal, and the Cecle, and the Arlington; and have thirty services at
your dinner betwixt soup and the "chasse;" and cannot spend a summer
afternoon in comfort unless you be drinking deep the intoxication of
hazard in your debts and your bets on the Heath or the Downs, at
Hurlingham or at Tattersalls' Rooms. You women, who sell your souls for
bits of stones dug from the bowels of the earth; who stake your honour
for a length of lace two centuries old; who replace the bloom your
passions have banished with the red of poisoned pigments; who wreathe
your aching heads with purchased tresses torn from prisons, and
madhouses, and coffins; who spend your lives in one incessant struggle,
first the rivalry of vanity and then the rivalry of ambition; who deck
out greed, and selfishness, and worship of station or gold, as "love,"
and then wonder that your hapless dupes, seizing the idol that you offer
them as worthy of their worship, fling it from them with a curse,
finding it dumb, and deaf, and merciless, a thing of wood and stone.

"Animalism," forsooth! God knows it would be well for you, here and
hereafter, men and women both, were you only patient, continent, and
singleminded, only faithful, gentle, and long-suffering, as are the
brutes that you mock, and misuse, and vilify in the supreme blindness of
your egregious vanity!

* * *

I was horribly cold and hungry; and this is a combination which kills
sentiment in bigger people than myself. The emotions, like a hothouse
flower or a sea-dianthus, wither curiously when aired in an east wind,
or kept some hours waiting for dinner.

* * *

In truth, too, despite all the fine chances that you certainly give your
peasants to make thorough beasts of themselves, they are your real
aristocrats, and have the only really good manners in your country. In
an old north-country dame, who lives on five shillings a week, in a
cottage like a dream of Teniers' or Van Tol's, I have seen a fine
courtesy, a simple desire to lay her best at her guest's disposal, a
perfect composure, and a