“It would be interesting to know what you will think of the American girl—then.”
“I can think only one way of her,” said Tranton firmly, and he put away his pipe as he might have taken off his hat. “She puzzles the foreigner, but she need not puzzle us after all. I was reading the other day a British officer’s estimate of our volunteers in Luzon. ‘They might be described,’ he says, ‘as a great military paradox—a body of men of magnificent physique, possessing perfect discipline, and yet without any discipline at all.’ It occurred to me that much the same thing might be said about the American girl. She doesn’t appear to have much discipline, but she has as much as her brothers, and evidently she has all she needs and the sort she needs.”
“If you had found her undisciplined, Tranton, you would have seen your duty.”
“I have no doubt that she has acquired a certain discipline from me—from her privilege of disciplining me. She will manage her husband better because she has been able to practise on me. She has given us new ideals. ‘She never suggests an inferiority that makes her lovely.’ We can’t imagine her lovely that way. She is never a ‘sad ungathered rose.’ She isn’t gathered. Sometimes I wish she was a shade less practical; but I generally attribute this wish to the wrong pipe or a streak of ugly weather. She only reflects the spirit of the age. The other day, in a moment of curiosity, I ran into one of those highly moral restaurants that have Biblical texts on the walls, and there, under the gorgeously lettered beatitude, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart,’ was the brutal admonition in plain black and white, ‘Keep your eye on your hat.’ Under the sign, ‘Blessed is the matchmaker,’ a man should be able to read, ‘Keep your eye on your head.’ The world knows its business, and I suppose it is a better world than it ever was before. Yet it seems as if it must be getting harder to write poetry about it. What should you say to that?”
“I should say that if the world is better than it was, and that if it really is harder to write poetry about it, so much the worse for poetry. The joke isn’t on the world. I certainly do not think there is less real poetry in the world. Perhaps people live poetry more and write poetry less. Your American girls will have to look into this matter. The other day one of the magazinists discussed ‘The Passing of the Man Poet.’ Suppose this does happen, who is to celebrate the American girl as only verse can celebrate her? Are her praises only to be sung in a frowsy, pipish cave at eleven-thirty by two doting, sentimental men? Here we are sliding into the night of the century. What a collection a century of her gowns and bonnets would make!—those high-waisted, clinging things, and the ‘pokes’ she wore in the morning of the century; the slope-shouldered, balloon-skirted affairs she put on at noon; the heaped enigmas she taunted the world with in the afternoon, and the modern décolleté paradox which little Tony Atwell explained in calling it a ‘coming out’ dress. We have become very plain and unpoetical, Tranton, but they are as picturesque as ever. They symbolize for us the eternal freshness, the unconquerable youth of nature. They preserve and transmit the primitive gayeties of art, the natural impulses of a younger world. The note of our raiment is blasé; hers gives token of an unjaded joy in the beautiful.”
“Sentiment,” said Tranton, “is like a cigar. You see only the smoke by daylight, the fire at night.”
“I don’t like that at all, for, by and by the cigar burns out.”
“Then you light another.”
“And if you do that too often you incur the smoker’s heart. Give heed to that, Tranton. Don’t tempt Providence. The day will come when your magic will wane of its power, when your ear will grow dull to the poetry of life, unless—”
“I never wrote poetry but once,” said Tranton, in a voice that scarcely explained whether he was speaking to the mandarin or to me. “Perhaps that was because I never lived poetry but once.” Then he stopped as if he had said more than he should, and reaching for his pipe he began filling it again, deliberately. When he had finished this labor and had the smoke rising again, he reached down and drew out one of the drawers of the desk and lifted a little ebony box. This he placed on the desk, and opened casually with his left hand, pulling hard at the pipe and staring straight before him. From out the velvet recesses of the box came a miniature photograph framed in gold.