A loud peal of the doorbell brought her back from Rome, and stopped Dr. Stetson in the middle of a story.
Roger came up the stairs two at a time, explaining to Hilda as he came.
"I'm awfully sorry, but I couldn't make it sooner. Miss Wainwright was later even than she expected. The train was stalled or something."
"That's all right. We've only just about begun."
When Roger had said he would come straight on, Anne had not thought of his clothes, and now, as he followed Hilda, she saw that he was in his everyday suit, rumpled and covered with a fine powdering of dust from the tree. A bit of wool and a scrap of tinsel clung to his sleeve. He looked tired. She saw Dr. Stetson size him up and a touch of annoyance cloud Belle's eyes. She was annoyed herself. Roger took the vacant place and Hilda made a great to-do about getting him salad, although Roger said, more emphatically than one usually refuses a course at a special dinner, that he did not want any. And when it came, he ate it as indifferently as if it had been plain lettuce. Anne saw her mother watching him and tried to catch his eye, but Roger's head was bent and she gave it up. Dr. Stetson had caught again the thread of his interrupted story, but Anne heard little of the rest. She wished that Roger would not sit so, absorbed in his salad as if he were alone at a lunch counter.
The others, seeing that Roger was not entering the talk, abandoned their pretense of eating slowly until he caught up with them, took their second helping of turkey, and disregarded him. As Hilda removed his salad plate and passed him turkey, Anne managed at last to catch his eye. He looked puzzled, frowned slightly, and with a distinct effort banished his thoughts and turned to the doctor.
"It's the same in all countries," the doctor was saying, "there's just a small group of people who really care for what's beautiful. We hear a lot about the artistic French and Italians. The average Latin—the ordinary man—doesn't respond to beauty, pure beauty, in itself, any more than does the average Saxon. They grub along with their eyes in the dust in exactly the same dull way."
"What is pure beauty, in itself?" Roger demanded, as if he were heckling a witness on the stand. "What is impure beauty, or beauty out of itself?"
Dr. Stetson regarded him for a moment with a smile of forced amusement, as if this were a joke, in poor taste, but to be condoned in a family gathering.
"The Latin past," he elaborated, "was very closely tangled up with Art, and, as they have nothing to be proud of now, they fall back a few centuries and rave about their paintings and marbles, which never did interest more than a very few of them. And it's the same thing with other nations which have not much now to boast of. They go back to something centuries ago and find comfort in it. You can't talk ten minutes to an educated Portuguese before he's referring to the dead glories of the Portuguese fleet and dragging in Vasco da Gama as if he lived to-day. A Spaniard—at any rate up until the time of the Spanish-American War—would talk as if Mexico and all South America were still theirs. Nations, like people, the less they have as a whole to boast of now, the more they blind themselves with the dreams a few choice souls among them had generations ago."