Part 6 (1/2)

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ Agapete is often translated 'adoptive sister.'

A very possible relation, I think, where there are vows of celibacy, and inward spiritual grace.

_Mrs. Opimian._ Very possible, indeed: and equally possible where there are none.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ But more possible where there are seven adoptive sisters, than where there is only one.

_Mrs. Opimian._ Perhaps.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ The manners, my dear, of these damsels towards their young master are infallible indications of the relations between them. Their respectful deference to him is a symptom in which I cannot be mistaken.

_Mrs. Opimian._ I hope you are not.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ I am sure I am not. I would stake all my credit for observation and experience on the purity of the seven Vestals. I am not strictly accurate in calling them so: for in Rome the number of Vestals was only six. But there were seven Pleiads, till one disappeared. We may fancy she became a seventh Vestal. Or as the planets used to be seven, and are now more than fifty, we may pa.s.s a seventh Vestal in the name of modern progress.

_Mrs. Opimian._ There used to be seven deadly sins. How many has modern progress added to them?

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ None, I hope, my dear. But this will be due, not to its own tendencies, but to the comprehensiveness of the old definitions.

_Mrs. Opimian._ I think I have heard something like your Greek word before.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ Agapemone, my dear. You may have heard the word Agapemone.

_Mrs. Opimian._ That is it. And what may it signify?

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ It signifies Abode of Love: spiritual love of course.

_Mrs. Opimian._ Spiritual love, which rides in carriages and four, fares sumptuously, like Dives, and protects itself with a high wall from profane observation.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ Well, my dear, and there may be no harm in all that.

_Mrs. Opimian._ Doctor, you are determined not to see harm in anything.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ I am afraid I see more harm in many things than I like to see. But one reason for not seeing harm in this Agapemona matter is, that I hear so little about it The world is ready enough to promulgate scandal; but that which is quietly right may rest in peace.

_Mrs. Opimian._ Surely, doctor, you do not think this Agapemone right?

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ I only say I do not know whether it is right or wrong. It is nothing new. Three centuries ago there was a Family of Love, on which Middleton wrote a comedy. Queen Elizabeth persecuted this family; Middleton made it ridiculous; but it outlived them both, and there may have been no harm in it after all.

_Mrs. Opimian._ Perhaps, doctor, the world is too good to see any novelty except in something wrong.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ Perhaps it is only wrong that arrests attention, because right is common, and wrong is rare. Of the many thousand persons who walk daily through a street you only hear of one who has been robbed or knocked down. If ever Hamlet's news--'that the world has grown honest'--should prove true, there would be an end of our newspaper. For, let us see, what is the epitome of a newspaper? In the first place, specimens of all the deadly sins, and infinite varieties of violence and fraud; a great quant.i.ty of talk, called by courtesy legislative wisdom, of which the result is 'an incoherent and undigested ma.s.s of law, shot down, as from a rubbish-cart, on the heads of the people ';{1} lawyers barking at each other in that peculiar style of dylactic delivery which is called forensic eloquence, and of which the first and most distinguished pract.i.tioner was Cerberus;{2} bear-garden meetings of mismanaged companies, in which directors and shareholders abuse each other in choice terms, not all to be found even in Rabelais; burstings of bank bubbles, which, like a touch of harlequin's wand, strip off their masks and dominoes from 'highly respectable' gentlemen, and leave them in their true figures of cheats and pickpockets; societies of all sorts, for teaching everybody everything, meddling with everybody's business, and mending everybody's morals; mountebank advertis.e.m.e.nts promising the beauty of Helen in a bottle of cosmetic, and the age of Old Parr in a box of pills; folly all alive in things called reunions; announcements that some exceedingly stupid fellow has been 'entertaining' a select company; matters, however multiform, multifarious, and mult.i.tudinous, all brought into family likeness by the varnish of false pretension with which they are all overlaid.

1 Jeremy Bentham.

2 Cerberus forensis erat causidicus.--Petronius Arbiter.

_Mrs. Opimian._ I did not like to interrupt you, doctor; but it struck me, while you were speaking, that in reading the newspaper you do not hear the bark of the lawyers.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ True; but no one who has once heard the wow-wow can fail to reproduce it in imagination.