My darling insists that the sweep shall overhaul the house
annually, while I cling, with what she is pleased to call masculine
fatuity, to the theory that soot, like sleeping dogs, should be let alone.
Have you ever entered a drawing-room just after a healthy, thorough fall
of soot? If so, you will appreciate what is meant by its
all-pervasiveness. The remotest articles of furniture are rife with
infinitesimal smut, much as they were rife with the remains of the lady
in Kipling's story after the jealous orang-outang had done with her. And
yet granting that the provocation was dire, a philosopher, a real
philosopher, would have acted very differently. A philosopher of the
grandest type would have reasoned that what was done was done, and that
there was no more use in crying over fallen soot than over spilt milk.
He would calmly have adopted prompt measures to ameliorate the situation,
and after the servants were fairly at work would have taken his wife
apart and pointed out to her, in well-chosen language, that here was only
another instance of his superior wisdom. One of a more virulent type,
but still a philosopher, might have indulged in mirth--quiet sarcastic
mirth. No person of a truly philosophic cast of mind and with a rooted
antipathy to damning would have sworn lustily as I did.
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