Page:Hichens - The Green Carnation.djvu/88

80 ," said Lady Locke thoughtfully. "From a worldly point of view, I suppose I have been born under a lucky star."

"There is no such thing as luck in the world," Madame Valtesi remarked, putting up a huge white parasol that abruptly extinguished the view for miles. "There is only capability."

"But some capable people are surely unlucky."

"They are incapable in one direction or another. Have you not noticed that whenever a man is a failure his friends say he is an able man. No man is able who is unable to get on, just as no woman is clever who can't succeed in obtaining that worst, and most necessary, of evils—a husband."

"You are very cynical," said Lady Locke, flicking the pony's fat white back with the whip.

"All intelligent people are. Cynicism is merely the art of seeing things as they are instead of as they ought to be. If one says that Christianity has never converted the Christians, or that love has ruined more women than hate, or that virtue is an accident of environment, one is sure to be dubbed a cynic. And yet all these remarks are true to absolute absurdity."