"I worry about everything. I am not a sceptic like you. I have a terrible sense of my liabilities." "Personally, I am a 'limited liability company,' and even then I am pessimist enough not to accept any." "That's very practical of you. You are a pessimist, Lewis, without giving much thought to it, merely for the sake of convenience. One has no worries if one can persuade oneself that this world means nothing. You get annoyed because it doesn't amuse me to go to my dressmaker, because I refuse the slavery of a rope of pearls, because my attention wanders, so you say, when you talk to me about champagne vintages; it is really because I am ashamed of profiting by all these things now that I don't work. The more I reflect on it, the more convinced I am that the world is one complete harmonious whole. The confusion in which we find ourselves at present is only transient and it is wrong to add to it." "You are a pessimistic optimist, and I am an optimistic pessimist," answered Lewis; "long ago I decided that we would get on as well as we could, I and my pleasure; I intend to live and die in its company, without bothering about other people." "No, Lewis, it's no good being cunning. You can leave that to tradespeople." "Things always arrange themselves." "Yes, but not always as we want them to." "Then why work at all?" "But that's just it: we don't, either of us. Do you think I did what I used to do out of rapacity? I did it first of all from necessity, then for my country, and lastly because, being on the earth, I have a feeling that I belong to a human association, to an austere company formed for production and economy." "What a pity it is that one cannot take everything you say down in writing!" "Don't scoff. I cannot bear to take without giving, to be a luxury article like other women, expensive yesterday, a nuisance to-day."