‘Now you are trying to make me feel a brute,’ answered Isabel. ‘But it is no good. If they are hurt, it is their own fault. Pain always implies some weakness in the person who suffers it. And you can’t make one person responsible for the inherent weaknesses of another, just because his action has stirred certain hidden symptoms to life. You might just as well scold me if I gave a tea-party, and somebody with advanced consumption got a cold at it, and died off. The disease was in him, not in me or my tea-party. And moral suffering is the symptom of a sort of moral phthisis. Only the diseased can suffer. So, as long as my actions are sane and healthy in themselves, you must not call them names if they happen to stumble on weak spots and corns in other people’s natures. I never knew the corns were there. I simply went my way. Everyone has a right to. Everyone must. And one is only responsible to one’s self, and only responsible for one’s self. So much for your accusation of hurting other people.’ ‘I never heard anything so callous in my life. If you were as bad as your words you would be a perfect fiend. But, mercifully, everyone in the world is better than their words, and worse than their thoughts.’ ‘Ah! you are a sentimentalist, Kingston. I am a realist.’ ‘Everyone thinks himself that. The only difference between the sentimentalist and the realist is that the sentimentalist’s reality is warm and beautiful, while the realist’s is glacial and hideous. And they are neither of them real realities, either. The real reality has something of both, and a great deal more than either or both together. Each view is only a glimpse of the great whole.’ ‘Yes; that’s not a bad idea. However old one may grow or think one’s self, one remains astonishingly much of a baby in the face of the immensities. I suppose to take any point of view is childish. One ought to take them all together, all at once--be a drunkard and a teetotaler and a bishop and a butcher and a thief and a saint all at one moment in one’s own person. That is the only way to get the perfect knowledge. And that, I suppose, is what the idea of God is. To understand everything by being everything. However, as that is so, I don’t think one need be ashamed of being a baby with lop-sided, partial, babyish views and fanaticisms.’ ‘Perhaps not. But you seemed to be proud of it. There is a great difference between being proud and not being ashamed.’ ‘Yes, Kingston, there is. And I admit it. And I give in. And I am defeated. And I want my tea. And I will try to behave prettily. And be an altruist with the tea-cake instead of an individualist.’