One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
that he did not complain. When mounted and ridden by the
satirist, in wrath at him for systematically feasting the pride
of the martyr on the maceration of his animal part, he put
on his martyr’s pride, which assumed a perfect contentment
in the critical depreciation of opposing systems: he was drawn
to state, as he had often done, that he considered our animal
part shamefully and dangerously over nourished, and that
much of the immorality of the world was due to the present
excessive indulgence in meats. ‘Not in drink?’ Miss Graves
inquired. ‘No,’ he said boldly; ‘not equally; meats are more
insidious. I say nothing of taking life—of fattening for that
express purpose: diseases of animals: bad blood made: cruelty
superinduced: it will be seen to be, it will be looked back
on, as a form of, a second stage of, cannibalism. Let that
pass. I say, that for excess in drinking, the penalty is paid
instantly, or at least on the morrow.’
‘Paid by the drunkard’s wife, you should say.’
‘Whereas intemperance in eating, corrupts constitutionally,
more spiritually vitiates, we think: on the whole, gluttony
is the least-generous of the vices.’
Colney lured Mr. Pempton through a quagmire of the vices
to declare, that it brutalized; and stammeringly to adopt the
suggestion, that our breeding of English ladies—those lights
of the civilized world—can hardly go with a feeding upon
flesh of beasts. Priscilla regretted that champagne should have
to be pleaded in excuse of impertinences to her sex. They
were both combative, nibbed for epigram, edged to inflict
wounds; and they were set to shudder openly at one another’s
practises; they might have exposed to Colney which of the
two maniacal sections of his English had the vaster conceit
of superiority in purity; they were baring themselves, as it
were with a garment flung-off at each retort. He reproached
them for undermineing their countrymen; whose Falstaff
panics demanded blood of animals to restore them; and their
periods of bragging, that they should brandify their wits to
imagine themselves Vikings.
Nataly interposed. She was vexed with him. He let his eyelids
drop: but the occasion for showing the prickliness of the
bristly social English, could not be resisted. Dr. Peter Yatt
was tricked to confess, that small annoyances were, in his
experience, powerful on the human frame; and Dr. John
Cormyn was very neatly brought round to assure him he
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