Carmen smiled up at him. “Well,” she began uncertainly, “since I have thawed out, or perhaps have become more accustomed to the cold, I have begun to make mental notes. Already I have thousands of them. But they are not yet classified, and so I can hardly answer your question, Mr. Ames. But I am sure of one thing, and that is that for the first few months I was here I was too cold to even think!”
Ames laughed. “Yes,” he agreed, “the change from the tropics was somewhat abrupt. But, aside from the climate?”
“It is like awaking from a deep sleep,” answered Carmen meditatively. “In Simití we dream our lives away. In New York all is action; loud words; harsh commands; hurry; rush; endeavor, terrible, materialistic endeavor! Every person I see seems to be going somewhere. He may not know where he is going––but he is on the way. He may not know why he is going––but he must not be stopped. He has so few years to live; and he must pile up money before he goes. He must own an automobile; he must do certain things which his more fortunate neighbor does, before his little flame of life goes out and darkness falls upon him. I sometimes think that people here are trying to get away from themselves, but they don’t know it. I think they come to the opera because they crave any sort of diversion that will make them forget themselves for a few moments, don’t you?”
“H’m! well, I can’t say,” was Ames’s meaningless reply, as he sat regarding the girl curiously.
“And,” she continued, as if pleased to have an auditor who at least pretended to understand her, “the thing that now strikes me most forcibly is the great confusion that prevails here in everything, in your government, in your laws, in your business, in your society, and, in particular, in your religion. Why, in that you have hundreds of sects claiming a monopoly of truth; you have hundreds of churches, hundreds of religious or theological beliefs, hundreds of differing concepts of God––but you get nowhere! Why, it has come to such a pass that, if Jesus were to appear physically on earth to-day, I am sure he would be evicted from his own Church!”
“Well, yes, I guess that’s so,” commented Ames, quite at sea in such conversation. “But we solid business men have found that religious emotion never gets a man anywhere. It’s weakening. Makes a man effeminate, and utterly unfits him for business. I wouldn’t have a man in my employ who was a religious enthusiast.”
“But Jesus was a religious enthusiast,” she protested.
“I doubt if there ever was such a person,” he answered dryly.
“Why, the Bible––”