Mrs Allmash.  It is so refreshing to meet any one so full of information and earnestness as you are, in this wicked, jaded London.  Please go on, Mr Rollestone; what you were saying was so interesting.  Have you really been experimentalising on your own moral organism?  How quite too extraordinary!

Lord Fondleton [aside to Mrs Gloring].  By Jove!  I had no idea old Rollestone could come out in this line.  He is a regular dark horse.  I should never have suspected it.  He will be first favourite in London this season, and win in a canter.

Coldwaite.  You will excuse me, Mr Rollestone, but I really am interested, and I really am serious.  It was with no idle curiosity that I was waiting to hear your answer to Mr Germsell’s inquiry, as to the nature of the moral experiment necessary to test the character of this unseen force.

Rollestone.  I can only say that any experiment which deals with the affectional and emotional part of one’s nature must be painful in the extreme.  There is, indeed, only one motive which would induce one to undergo the trials, sufferings, sacrifices, and ordeals which it involves—­and that is one in which you will sympathise:  it is the hope that humanity may benefit by the result of one’s efforts.  Indeed, any lower motive than this would vitiate them.  I will venture to assert to Mr Germsell, who is so sceptical as to the existence of any other quality in that force, which he can only fathom so far as to know that it is physical, that I will put him through a course of experiment which will cause him more acute moral suffering than his brain could bear, unless it was sustained by a force which, by that experimental process, will reveal attributes contained in it not dreamt of in his philosophy.

Germsell.  I have no doubt you could strain my mind until it was weak enough to believe anything, even your fantastic theories.  Thank you, I would rather continue to experiment with my own microscope and forceps than let you experiment either upon my affections or my brains.

Fussle [aside to Mr Rollestone].  You could not make anything of them even if he consented—­the former don’t exist, and the latter are mere putty—­but I can quite understand your desire to begin in corpore vili.

Lord Fondleton [aside to Mrs Gloring].  Allow me freely to offer you my affections as peculiarly adapted to experiments of this nature.

Rollestone.  It has always struck me as strange that men of science, who don’t shrink from testing, for instance, the value of poisons, or the nature of disease, by heroically subjecting their own external organisms to their action, should shrink from experimenting on that essential if remote vitalising force, which can only be reached by moral experiment, and disorder in which produces not only moral obliquity and mental alienation, but physical disease as well.