“Disinterested,” she was saying, “disinterested….” Mrs. Aldwinkle had a way, when she wanted to insist on an idea, of repeating the same word several times. “Disinterested….” It saved her the trouble of looking for phrases which she could never find, of making explanations which always turned out, at the best, rather incoherent. “Joy in the work for its own sake.… Flaubert spent days over a single sentence.… Wonderful.…”
“Wonderful!” Irene echoed.
A little breeze stirred among the bay trees. Their stiff leaves rattled dryly together, like scales of metal. Irene shivered a little; it was downright cold.
“It’s the only really creative….” Mrs. Aldwinkle couldn’t think of the word “activity” and had to content herself with making a gesture with her free hand. “Through art man comes nearest to being a god … a god.…”
The night wind rattled more loudly among the bay leaves. Irene crossed her arms over her chest, hugging herself to keep warm. Unfortunately, this boa of flesh and blood was itself sensitive. Her frock was sleeveless. The warmth of her bare arms drifted off along the wind; the temperature of the surrounding atmosphere rose by a hundred-billionth of a degree.
“It’s the highest life,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle. “It’s the only life.”
Tenderly she rumpled Irene’s hair. And at this very moment, Mr. Falx was meditating, at this very moment, on tram-cars in the Argentine, among Peruvian guano-beds, in humming power-stations at the foot of African waterfalls, in Australian refrigerators packed with slaughtered mutton, in the heat and darkness of Yorkshire coal-mines, in tea-plantations on the slopes of the Himalaya, in Japanese banks, at the mouth of Mexican oil-wells, in steamers walloping along across the China Sea—at this very moment, men and women of every race and colour were doing their bit to supply Mrs. Aldwinkle with her income. On the two hundred and seventy thousand pounds of Mrs. Aldwinkle’s capital the sun never set. People worked; Mrs. Aldwinkle led the higher life. She for art only, they—albeit unconscious of the privilege—for art in her.
Young Lord Hovenden sighed. If only it were he whose fingers were playing in the smooth thick tresses of Irene’s hair! It seemed an awful waste that she should be so fond of her Aunt Lilian. Somehow, the more he liked Irene the less he liked Aunt Lilian.
“Haven’t you sometimes longed to be an artist yourself, Hovenden?” Mrs. Aldwinkle suddenly asked. She leaned forward, her eyes glittering with the reflected light of two or three hundred million remote suns. She was going to suggest that he might try his hand at poetical rhapsodies about political injustice and the condition of the lower classes. Something half-way between Shelley and Walt Whitman.
“Me!” said Hovenden in astonishment. Then he laughed aloud: Ha, ha, ha! It was a jarring note.