'But they have love, too; love of the poor and of a lofty ideal,' said the Princess. 'Myself, I forgive their little tin cans, though they are extremely unpleasant, when I think of their impersonal devotion. All I wish is, that their warfare was not conducted by tin cans; the thing has a ludicrous, comical, vulgar side; death dropped in a little box labelled "glass, with care"! There is no dignity in it, no grace. Pallida Mors should not crouch under a cab-cushion!'
'How can you make a jest----' began Prince Napraxine. She interrupted him:
'I am not in the least jesting, I am entirely in earnest. I do not like being made war on by chemists; I do not like annihilation left in a paper parcel; it makes one feel absurd, fate seems trifling with one. A Jacquerie hewing at one with their scythes one would know what to do with, but who can extract any Sophoclean tragedy from a Thanatus that looks exactly like a box of sardines or a pot of _foie gras_? It is not the war that I object to, it is the form it takes; and our great, grim, ghostly Russia should evolve out of her soul of ice something much more in consonance with her. Beside the burning of Moscow, the little tin cans and the burrowing like moles underground are commonplace and a little vulgar. Russia is so awful in herself. One thinks of the frozen world of the Inferno, and Dante and Virgil walking in the spectral silence; and then, after all, in hard fact there is nothing but the police, and the drunken moujik, and the man who carries his nitro-glycerine as a baker's boy carries his rolls of bread! It is bathos.'
'One never knows what you mean, Nadine,' murmured her husband. 'If you talk so at Petersburg they will think you are a Nihilist at heart.'
'I imagine half the _noblesse_ are,' said the Princess. 'The _noblesse_ have always dug their own graves before all revolutions everywhere. They call it "going with the times." They did it in France, they are now doing it in England, they are doing it (more secretly) in Russia. No one should forsake their order; it is a kind of desertion, like that of a soldier who runs away before the enemy. That is why I like the party obedience of your country, Wilkes; it is entirely unintelligent and profoundly immoral; to a generally intellectual nation it would be impossible, but it is loyal. I think when one has to choose between a crime and a disloyalty one must take the crime as the lesser evil of the two.'