and cold or soft and warm? I don't care. I shall slip it between my breasts and hold it close." [Pg 32] She paused a moment opposite him. "Am I talking damned rot?" she asked. "I daresay I am. I am a rotter then, because all I say is me. Another thing, too: morally, I am not in the least worthy of you. I don't know any one who is. I don't really, and I'm not flattering you, because I don't rate the moral qualities very high. They are compatible with such low organizations. Earwigs, I read the other day, are excellent mothers. How that seems to alter one's conception of the beauty of the maternal[Pg 33] instinct! It does not alter my conception of earwigs in the least, and I shall continue to kill any excellent mothers that I find in my room." [Pg 33] Hugh laughed suddenly and uproariously and then became perfectly grave again. "Your moral organization is probably extremely low," he said. "But I settled long ago to overlook that." "Ah, there we are again," said Nadine. "You deliberately propose to misconceive me, with the kindest intentions I know, but with how wrong a principle. You shut your eyes to me, as if—as if I was a smut! You settle to overlook the fact that I have no real moral perception. Could you settle to overlook the fact if I had no nose and only one tooth? I assure you the lack of a moral nature is a more serious defect. But, poor devil that I am, how was I to get one? We were talking about heredity before you came in—" Nadine paused a moment. "As a matter of fact," she said, "I was telling them that there was no truth in heredity. We will now take the other side of the question. How was I, considering my family, to have moral perceptions?" "Are you being quite consistent?" asked Hugh. "Why should I be consistent? Who is consistent except those simple people whom you buy so many of for six shillings, and they are consistently tiresome. How, I said, was I to have got moral perception? There is Daddy! If I was a doctor I would certify any one to be insane who said Daddy was a moral[Pg 34] organism. There is darling Mama! I would horse-whip any one who said the same of her, for his gross stupidity and insolence. The result is me; I am more pagan than Heliogabalus. I do not think that anything is right or that anything
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