As little humbug as possible; and as little loss of
self-respect, but we shall have to shake a good many dirty hands.
Your turn for 'slumming' will serve us well, but I know the dangers
of it. You'll be coming home _eploree_, as they say here.
I hope you'll grow stronger in that respect. One has to harden one's
heart a little."
"I know it is wiser to do so."
"Of course! It's not only that you are constantly imposed upon; the
indulgence of universal sympathy is incompatible with duty to one's
self--unless you become at once a sister of mercy. One is bound,
in common sense, to close eyes and ears against all but a trifling
fraction of human misery. Why, look, we sit here, and laugh and talk
and enjoy ourselves; yet at this instant what horrors are being
enacted in every part of the world! Men are perishing by every
conceivable form of cruelty and natural anguish. Sailors are
gurgling out their life in sea-storms; soldiers are agonizing on
battle-fields; men, women, and children are being burnt, boiled,
hacked, squashed, rent, exploded to death in every town and almost
every village of the globe. Here in Paris, and over there in London,
there is no end to the forms of misery our knowledge suggests--all
suffered while we eat and talk. But to sit down and think
persistently of it would lead to madness in any one of imagination
like yours.
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