Moreover they were quite modern young people, and therefore entirely devoid of all the sentimentality and “world-sorrow” which made youth so delightfully gloomy and desperately cynical, without the least real cynicism, in the middle of the nineteenth century.  In those days no young man who showed a ray of belief in anything had a chance with a woman, and no woman had a chance with men unless she had a hidden sorrow.  Women used to construct themselves a secret and romantic grief in those times, with as much skill as they bestowed on their figure and face, and there were men who spent hours in reading Schopenhauer in order to pick out and treasure up a few terribly telling phrases; and love-making turned upon the myth that life was not worth living.

We have changed all that now; whether for better or worse, the social historians of the future will decide for us after we are dead, so we need not trouble our heads about the decision unless we set up to be moralists ourselves.  The enormous tidal wave of hypocrisy is retiring, and if the shore discovered by the receding waves is here and there horribly devastated and hopelessly bare, it is at least dry land.

The wave covered everything for a long time, from religion to manners, from science to furniture, and we who are old enough to remember, and not old enough to regret, are rubbing our eyes and looking about us, as on a new world, amazed at having submitted so long to what we so heartily despised, glad to be able to speak our minds at last about many things, and astounded that people should at last be allowed to be good and suffered to be bad, without the affectation of seeming one or the other, in a certain accepted manner governed by fashion, and imposed by a civilized and perfectly intolerant society.

While progress advances, it really looks as if humanity were reverting to its types, with an honest effort at simplicity.  There is a revival of the moral individuality of the middle ages.  The despot proudly says, like Alexander, or Montrose in love, that he will reign, and he will reign alone; and he does.  The financier plunders mankind and does not pretend that he is a long-lost type of philanthropist.  The anarchist proclaims that it is virtuous to kill kings, and he kills them.  The wicked do not even make a pretence of going to church on Sundays.  If this goes on, we shall have saints before long.

Hypocrisy has disappeared even from literature, since no one who now writes books fit to read can be supposed to do so out of respect for public opinion, still less from any such base motive as a desire for gain.

Malipieri and Sabina both felt that they had been drawn much nearer together by what had sounded like idle chatter, and yet neither of them was inclined to continue talking in the same way.  Moreover time was passing quickly, and there was a matter to be decided before they parted.  Malipieri returned to the subject of his discovery, and his desire that Sabina should see it.