"
"What is a-a--I didn't quite catch the thing you hate?"
"The thing is a small knot of self-anxious people who think that
they possess among them all the bowels of the world."
"Possess all the what, Reginald?"
"I said bowels,--using an ordinary but very ill-expressed metaphor.
The ladies and gentlemen to whom I allude, not looking very clearly
into the systems of pains and pleasures in accordance with which we
have to live, put their splay feet down now upon this ordinary
operation and now upon that, and call upon the world to curse the
cruelty of those who will not agree with them. A lady whose tippet
is made from the skins of twenty animals who have been wired in the
snow and then left to die of starvation--"
"Oh, Reginald!"
"That is the way of it. I am not now saying whether it is right or
wrong. The lady with the tippet will justify the wires and the
starvation because, as she will say, she uses the fur. An honest
blanket would keep her just as warm. But the fox who suffers
perhaps ten minutes of agony should he not succeed as he usually
does in getting away,--is hunted only for amusement! It is true
that the one fox gives amusement for hours to perhaps some hundred;
but it is only for amusement. What riles me most is that these
would-be philosophers do not or will not see that recreation is as
necessary to the world as clothes or food, and the providing of the
one is as legitimate a business as the purveying of the other.
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