Miracle Gold: A Novel (Vol. 2 of 3)Dowling, Richard
General
Miracle Gold: A Novel (Vol. 2 of 3)
Dowling, Richard
Fiction
"None of them. Simply pork. You observe that the people who are
nearest the sensible and uncorrupted beasts worship pork. If you hear
anyone speak well of pork, that person is a sensualist at heart. I
sigh continually for pork. The higher order of apes, including man,
live in trees and on fruits that grow nearer to Heaven than any other
thing. Cows and sheep and low types of man and brutes of moderate
grossness eat things they find on the earth, such as grass and corn,
and hares and deer and goats, but it is only pigs and men of the
lowest types that burrow into the ground for food. The lowest creature
of all is the sensualist, who not only eats potatoes and turnips and
carrots but the very pigs that root for things nature has had the
decency to hide away from the sight of the eyes of angels and of men.
Can you conceive anything lower in the scale of sensual joy or more
delicious than pork and onions? I tell you, Sir Julius, if this
humpbacked dwarf only had money, a handsome wife and courage, he could
popularize sausages being served before the soup. He is the only man
since Napoleon the Great who has the manner of power sufficient for
such a reform."
"Let us devoutly hope, Lady Forcar, that he may bring about the
blessed change, that is if you wish it."
"Wish it! Good Heavens, Sir Julius, you don't for a moment fancy me
capable of trifling with such a subject! I say to you deliberately, it
is the only thing which would now save Society from ennui and its
present awful anxiety about the temperature of the soup."
The dowager Lady Forcar was well known for her persiflage, her
devotion to her young and plain daughter-in-law, the head now of her
son's house, her inch-thick paint, of which she spoke freely and
explained on the grounds of keeping in the swim, and her intense
interest in all that affected the welfare of the rural cottager.
Sir Julius Whinfield, in spite of his very fresh young face and
affectation, was an excellent authority on Hebrew and the manufacture
of silk, so that if he had only happened to live once upon a time he
might have talked wisdom to Solomon and dresses with Solomon's wives.
He was not a clever conversationalist, but when not under pressure
could say sound things pithily. Of Lady Forcar he once declared that
he never understood what a saint must have been like when living until
he met her. This did not come to her ears and had nothing to do with
her liking for the young man.
The tall, military-looking man who had been speaking to Miss Ashton,
and who was not a soldier but a composer of music, now came up and
said:
"I am in sore need of you, Lady Forcar. I am about to start a new
crusade. I am going to try to depose the greatest tyrant of the time."
"And who is that? Wagner? Bismarck? The Russian Bear? The Higher
Culture?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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