"Marie-Joseph," I said cautiously, when I had watched the third cup of coffee disappear, and duly discussed butter and cheese, wine and cows, "do you think the world is getting better?" She was slicing a chunk of bread with her capacious pocket-knife, and stopped short. Her small bright blue eyes peered at me curiously. "I mean, do you believe there is real progress--that we are better than we used to be?"
The knife came dancing down on the plate. "Better?" she said; "not at all; we are worse. Why, when I was young we used constantly to have processions and carry le Bon Dieu, and I tell you the harvest was different from what it is now. And the young girls were modest then; they all wore aprons, and our curé used to insist on them wearing aprons, for, said he, all women should wear aprons."
"All women should wear aprons," I repeated mechanically, as my thoughts flitted back to Babylon.
Marie-Joseph saw and misinterpreted my disappointment. "Did you grasp what I said?" she asked; "there is no modesty nowadays. And you people who come from England," she added sternly, "with your short skirts and your peculiar ways, don't improve matters."
I felt duly rebuked, and during the rest of the hour which Marie-Joseph wasted on me, I sought to re-establish myself in her opinion by discoursing on the merits of _soupe au fromage_.
We all have our chosen test of moral worth, and perhaps our judgment of the decline and rise of social virtue is as easily swayed by personal predilection as was that of Marie-Joseph. To me the persistence of the same cruel and stupid customs throughout the centuries is a source of perplexed pessimism. I cannot brush aside the problem by a facile reference to reincarnation. If John the brigand was a cut-throat and a robber in his twentieth appearance on this planet, why should he persist in these idiosyncrasies in his twenty-third return as George the politician and successful captain of industry? This is not at all a fair representation of the theory of reincarnation, I shall be told. It is not, but it is one of those to which we are driven in the desperation of impatience. A friend of mine, a high authority on matters theosophical, knows of a potent explanation and anodyne for moral impatience. Humanity, he tells me, is always being recruited from Mars. Mars, in spite of its canals, is a low and wicked planet, with a reptilian population. When the Martians advance a little beyond the moral status of their fellow-creatures and close their bloodthirsty eyes in death, their spirits are wafted to our planet, there to take on new garments of flesh. The influx of brutal souls is perennial. This explains why, Churches and missionary effort notwithstanding, we have always savages, cannibals, and barbarians (and Prussian militarists?) with us. But there is comfort in the other side of the picture. When we in our turn have learnt all the lessons of this miserable globe of folly, when we have mastered all the virtues and shed all the vices, when we long to be free from the trammels of sense and appetite and sickness and ambition, we are transferred to Mercury. Mercury is a highly evolved planet, a spiritualized existence, free from the obsessions of sex and greed, an abode of love and freedom.