But the other bachelor jouster was not at all disconcerted by this reproof, nor by the tone of it, which was incautiously superior. “By George, Oliphant, I always have believed you were really a true Westerner under that surface of yours! The way you said ‘the world won’t get anywhere very fast’ was precisely in the right tone. You’re reverting to type, and if the reversion doesn’t stop I shan’t be surprised to hear of your breathing deep of the smoke and calling it ‘Prosperity’ with the best of them!”
Harlan was displeased. “I suppose the smoke comes under your definition of beauty, too, doesn’t it?”
“It isn’t my definition,” George explained. “I was groping for Dan’s. Yes, I think the smoke’s beautiful to him because he believes it means growth and power, and he thinks they’re beautiful.”
“I dare say. Would you consider it a rational view for any even half-educated man to hold—that soft-coal smoke is beautiful? Do you think so, Martha, when it makes pneumonia epidemic, ruins everything white that you have in your house and everything white that you wear? Do you?”
“It’s pretty trying,” she answered, as a conscientious housewife, but added hopefully: “We’ll get rid of it some day, though. So many people are complaining of it I’m sure they’ll do something about it before long.”
Harlan laughed dryly, for he had hoped she would say that. “I’ve been re-reading John Evelyn’s diary,” he said. “Evelyn declared the London smoke was getting so dreadful that a stop would have to be put to it somehow. The king told him to devise a plan for getting rid of it, and Evelyn set about it quite hopefully. That was in the latter part of the seventeenth century. Evelyn is dead, but the smoke’s still there.”
“And yet,” George McMillan said coolly, “I’m told they’ve made quite a place of London, in spite of that!”
Martha laughed aloud, and Harlan was so unfortunate as to be annoyed. “It seems rather a childish argument in view of the fact that we sit here in the atmosphere of what might well be a freight yard,” he said; and, turning to Martha he spoke in a lowered voice, audible to his opponent, yet carrying the implication that McMillan was excluded from the conference. “My committee have at last got the symphony organization completed,” he said. “The orchestra knows it can depend on a reliable support now, and the first concert will be two weeks from to-night. I hope you won’t mind going with me.”
“No; I won’t mind,” she said, and hospitably explained to McMillan: “We’ve been trying for years to expand our week of the ‘April Festival’ into something more permanent. Mr. Oliphant has done most of the work, and it’s really a public service. It will be good news for your sister;—I understand she’s always felt we were a lost people, in music particularly.”
“We’ll have a start at any rate,” Harlan said, as he rose to go. “That is, if the smoke doesn’t throttle our singers. Venable is back from South America and there ought to be some interest to hear him.”