"It does not matter how wicked we all are, so long as we can see the humor of sin. To be able to laugh at ourselves is the great thing," murmured Lady Joan. "There is nothing so depressing," continued the musician, without heeding the interruption, "as the spectacle of a man who will not face his own wickedness--or even his own goodness. It is a sign of the age, this wretched spirit of compromise; we don't live in town because it is unhealthy, and the fogs are so bad--" "My dear, that was not the reason," Lady Raleigh murmured--also unheeded. "--and we don't live in the country because it is too far to come up to the concerts; so we live at Crouch End or Putney, where an exasperating local railway lies between us and St. James's Hall, and where the ends of the fogs hang about for days. We haven't the pluck to say yea or nay; we leave all our decisions to the gods, who throw them back upon us again, or to--to fate, who only plays with us at will; we would do anything to shirk the responsibility of the ego. Look at Helen, now; the bent of her character is towards religion, yet she hesitates to go into a convent. Therefore her religion does not make her picturesque." "Digby! How _can_ you argue at breakfast time? And I think you might keep your horrid atheistical notions to yourself before the children," cried Helen, crossly. She had not recovered from her passage of arms with the Squire. Digby plodded on with his breakfast and his theory. "We are all the same, as a family. Take the father: he would lay down his life for the working-man, or he thinks so; and yet he is afraid to go in for Socialism, which offers the only solution to the labor question. It is an age of compromise; we are all cowards." "Digby is so fond of taking his own particular failings and generalizing them," said the still ruffled Helen to nobody in particular. "People with decided opinions, picturesque people, as you call them, are people with fads; and I hate people with fads," said Lady Joan, "they are ten times more uninteresting than the weathercock sort of people who make compromises. Why should you always behave as if you went by clockwork? It is far too much trouble when, after all, nothing matters. And why do you want to be quarrelling with the age perpetually? It seems a nice comfortable sort of age to me; I suppose it has a different aspect for musical people."