“It might have been; if they could only have kept their heads—metaphorically as well as literally. But the glory and ardour were too mixed with hatred and ignorance. I’m afraid I do tend to distrust those states of feeling. They tend so easily to self-deception.”
She was looking at him, quietly and attentively, and he was, for the first time since their initial meeting, perhaps, feeling quite benevolently towards her; quite as the British Empire might feel towards a subject race. It was, therefore, the more difficult to feel anything but exasperation when she said, having, evidently, summed up her impressions and found her verdict: “Yes. You distrust them. We always come back to that, don’t we? You distrust yourself, too. So that, when you tell me what you believe, you can only do it in the form of making fun of my beliefs. I feel about you, Mr. Oldmeadow, what I felt that morning when I tried to come near you and you wouldn’t let me. I feel it more the more I see you; and it makes me sad. It isn’t only that you distrust ardour and glory, all the sunlight and splendour of life; but you are afraid of them; afraid to open your heart to trust. You shut your door upon the sunlight and take up your caustic pen; and you don’t see how the shadows fall about you.”
It was indeed a dusty tumble from the quite civilized pavement of their interchange, and it was unfortunate that upon his moment of discomfiture, when he saw himself as trying to clap the dust off his knees and shoulders in time to be presentable, Barney and Mrs. Aldesey should have chosen to approach them. Barney, no doubt, imagined it a propitious moment in which to display to Mrs. Aldesey his wife’s and his friend’s amity.
Adrienne was perfectly composed. She had borne her testimony and, again, done her best for him, pointing out to him that the first step towards enfranchisement was to open his door to the sunlight that she could so bountifully supply. She turned a clear, competent eye upon her husband and his companion.
“Well, dear, and what have you and Roger been so deep in?” Barney inquired, looking down at her with a fondness in which, all the same, Oldmeadow detected the anxiety that had hovered in his eye all evening. “You’ve seemed frightfully deep.”
“We have been,” said Adrienne, looking up at him. “In liberty, equality and fraternity; all the things I believe in and that Mr. Oldmeadow doesn’t. I can’t imagine how he gets on at all, he believes in so few things. It must be such a sad, dim, groping world to live in when there are no stars above to look at and no hands below to hold.”
“Oh, well, you see,” said Mrs. Aldesey with her dragging smile, “his ancestors didn’t sign the Declaration of Independence.”
“We don’t need ancestors to do that,” Adrienne smiled back. “All of us sign it for ourselves—all of us who have accepted our birthright and taken the gifts that our great, modern, deep-hearted world hold out to us. You are an American, Mrs. Aldesey, so you find it easy to believe in freedom, don’t you?”
“Very easy; for myself; but not for other people,” Mrs. Aldesey replied and Oldmeadow saw at once, with an added discomfort, that she underestimated, because of Adrienne’s absurdity, Adrienne’s intelligence. “But then the very name of any abstraction—freedom, humanity, what you will—has always made me feel, at once, dreadfully sleepy. It’s not ever having had my mind trained, Mrs. Barney. Now yours was, beautifully, I can see.”
Adrienne looked up at her, for Mrs. Aldesey, her lace about her shoulders, her lorgnette in her hands, had not seated herself, and it was further evident to Oldmeadow that she weighed Mrs. Aldesey more correctly than Mrs. Aldesey weighed her. “Very carefully, if not beautifully,” she said. “Have I made you sleepy already? But I don’t want to go on talking about abstractions. I want to talk about Mr. Oldmeadow. The truth is, Barney,” and her voice, as she again turned her eyes on her husband, had again the form but not the substance of gaiety, “the truth is that he’s a lonely, lonely bachelor and that we ought to arrange a marriage for him, you and I. Since he doesn’t believe in freedom, he won’t mind having a marriage arranged, will he?—if we can find a rare, sweet, gifted girl.”