“I see your argument,” said Hermione; “you want me to say that the sacrifices aren’t bloody, and then you’ll say that Pyrrhus acted from a religious motive, and therefore he isn’t brutal. Well, I really think our altars are barbarous—we should have outgrown them long ago, as we have outgrown human sacrifices.”

“Many people feel that way,” said Helen. “But if we kill the sheep for food, you have no prejudice against eating them, I know. If you consider meat for a dinner a cannibalistic custom, you manage to hide your opinion.”

“How foolish, mother! Of course we eat meat. Why shouldn’t we?”

“The sheep might have an argument against it,” said Helen, “but I have none. I merely wondered at what point you are at ease in the presence of what you call murder. I see. The animal slaughtered for religious purposes has your pity, but the one served up on your table fulfils its destiny as something for you to eat.”

“I can’t follow you when you are facetious. What am I to understand? Do you approve of human sacrifices? Do you think it was right to kill those two girls?”

“I wouldn’t have killed them myself,” said Helen, “yet in war men and women are sacrificed, in quite a religious sense, to the divine ends people think the war is serving. Whether it is good or bad for them to be sacrificed, I don’t know. Nobody knows. But few object. If it is right to sacrifice people in war, I don’t know what argument you could make against the altars. If you regret the sacrifice of those girls, you are regretting merely that they didn’t exist for a few more years. You don’t know what those extra years would have been like. If they were to be uneventful—I mean, inwardly so—if they were to be an unreal, unimportant number of breaths drawn, and meals eaten, and nights slept away, without any sense of living, then perhaps it was better for them to crowd many deep and strong emotions into a few hours. Don’t think I’m against your humane tendencies, Hermione; I’m merely comparing the two girls you spoke of, sacrificed barbarously as they were, with myself, who have missed the excitements and the enthusiasms of life, as I just told you.”

“You don’t mean,” said Hermione, “you wish father had killed you?”