Why should I undertake to keep a woman by me for the entire space of her life, watching her grow fat, grey, wrinkled, and foolish? Think of the annoyance of perpetually looking after any one, especially a woman! Besides, marriage is antagonistic to my ideal. You say that no ideal illumines the pessimist's life, that if you ask him why he exists, he cannot answer, and that Schopenhauer's arguments against suicide are not even plausible causistry. True, on this point his reasoning is feeble and ineffective. But we may easily confute our sensual opponents. We must say that we do not commit suicide, although we admit it is a certain anodyne to the poison of life,--an absolute erasure of the wrong inflicted on us by our parents,--because we hope by noble example and precept to induce others to refrain from love. We are the saviours of souls. Other crimes are finite; love alone is infinite. We punish a man with death for killing his fellow; but a little reflection should make the dullest understand that the crime of bringing a being into the world exceeds by a thousand, a millionfold that of putting one out of it. Men are to-day as thick as flies in a confectioner's shop; in fifty years there will be less to eat, but certainly some millions more mouths. I laugh, I rub my hands! I shall be dead before the red time comes. I laugh at the religionists who say that God provides for those He brings into the world. The French Revolution will compare with the revolution that is to come, that must come, that is inevitable, as a puddle on the road-side compares with the sea. Men will hang like pears on every lamp-post, in every great quarter of London, there will be an electric guillotine that will decapitate the rich like hogs in Chicago. Christ, who with his white feet trod out the blood of the ancient world, and promised Universal Peace, shall go out in a cataclysm of blood. The neck of mankind shall be opened, and blood shall cover the face of the earth. _Conscience_. Your philosophy is on a par with your painting and your poetry; but, then, I am a conscience, and a conscience is never philosophic--you go in for "The Philosophy of the Unconscious"? _I_. No, no, 'tis but a silly vulgarisation. But Schopenhauer, oh, my Schopenhauer! Say, shall I go about preaching hatred of women? Were I to call them a short-legged race that was admitted into society only a hundred and fifty years ago? _Conscience_. You cannot speak the truth even to me; no, not even at half-past twelve at night. _I_. Surely of all hours this is the one in which it is advisable to play you false? _Conscience._ You are getting humorous. _I_. I am getting sleepy. You are a tiresome old thing, a relic of the ancient world--I mean the mediæval world. You know that I now affect antiquity? _Conscience_.