“Then what is to be done, Dan?” inquired Lionel.
“Well, there is nothing to be done except to be cremated unostentatiously. ‘Let the dead bury their dead’; but Society decided otherwise, for it was the living that despatched the dead, which was a most unequal job.”
“I wonder what will be the ultimate result of all these reforms?” lazily said George Murray. “If you reform burials, you must also some day reform marriage; you will find a great deal of incongruity and of levity in that ceremony also; then will follow the reform of the relations between the sexes, between employers and employees, and goodness only knows what next. You will have your work cut out for you, my poor Danford; and dear Lionel’s mission will not be a sinecure if he has to patronise every scheme your Committee brings forward.”
“You have my entire assent to every reform you may suggest to me, Dan,” concluded Lionel, smiling at his guide, who remarked that he had never yet seen that smile on his pupil’s lips nor ever remarked that look in his eyes; he was sure something new had happened to illumine the face of the Mayfair cynic.
“I am afraid you will come in for a good share in this evolution, Murray,” and Lionel turned his face towards the novelist. “Fiction as you conceive it is a thing of the past. Clothes and environment have clung like a Nessus robe round your feminine heroines and masculine personages, and given them a rag-shop philosophy. Tear the bandages that swathed your fictional humanity, and send into the open air your _dramatis personæ_, to compete, fight and win in the race of life. You have believed yourself long enough the apostle of subtle psychology and of morbid physiology; for once be the humble disciple of Dame Nature, for she is now turning her bull’s-eye lantern right into your face and making you squint.”
“My lord is right,” crowed the mischievous buffoon. “I feel sure your publisher will not bring out your next book; sorry for you, old fellow, but you see there is no money in it any more. I saw Christopher a few days ago, and he led me to understand that the kind of fiction you excelled in will not appeal any longer to the general public. One of the two; either the feminine reader is one who harbours a sickly regret for her past toggery, or she is a modern woman won over to the cause of true modesty. In the first case she will throw your book away, for it will make her feel discontented with her present state; and in the latter instance she will shut your pages while blushes will cover her lovely cheeks at the mere thought of anything so indecent as—clothes. But, of course, I forget that the books published now will necessarily be very limited, as parchment is the only available material on which written thought can be printed.”