"Well, it's what one believes that counts, isn't it, and one can form any theory in a world where dreams are as real as other things, and is it the same with ideals?" somebody ventured.
"Ideals," said Stevenson, "are apt to stay by you when material things have taken the proverbial wings, and are assets quite as enduring as stone fences."
"And was it a want of faith in the durability of stone fences, or ignorance of their dream-assets, that accounts for the way that Cato and Demosthenes solved their problems?" was the next question, but as this high strain was interrupted by more frivolity, my thoughts again reverted to the solidity of Stevenson's dreams, that now furnished his inquiring soul with new fields for exploitation, as well as a dominant interest to fill up the measure of his earthly span.
He regretted leaving the haunts of man, he told us, particularly the separation from his friends, which was satisfactory, coming, as it did, from the man who coined the truism that the way to have a friend is to be one.
But this was his fighting chance, "and a fellow has to die fighting, you know." What was civilization anyway to one who needed only sunshine and negligée? Thus in no other than a tone of pleasantry did he refer to his condition, and never have I seen a face or heard a voice so exempt from bitterness. He told me, in fact, that he was unable to breathe in a room with more than four people in it at a time. This sounds like an exaggeration, or one of the vagaries of the sick, yet things that seem trifles to the well, can be tragic to the nervous sufferer. Mrs. Low has told me that at a dinner of only five or six covers Stevenson would frequently get up and throw open a window to breathe in enough ozone to enable him to get through the evening.
He was embarking to the lure of soft airs and long, subliminal solitudes, accepting gracefully the one hope held out, when the crowded habitations of cities had become a torture. We felt the pity of the enforced exile of so companionable a spirit, but we did not voice it, feeling constrained to live up to the standard of cheerfulness he had so valiantly set for us.
Mr. Eaton, who boasted that, in him, a good sea captain had been spoiled to make a bad painter, encouraged Stevenson to talk freely of his plans, and he dwelt at some length on the beauty and seaworthiness of the yacht Casco, that had been chartered for the voyage. This sea theme led, of course, to the inevitable fish stories, and after some mythological whale had been swallowed by some non-Biblical Jonah, I remarked, in the lull that followed, "Maybe the waters of the South Seas will yield you up a heroine."
A laugh went around at this, for some present thought I had said a "herring." But Stevenson had no doubt as to my meaning. "I am always helpless," said he, "when I try to describe a woman; but then," he added, brightly, "how should I hope to understand a woman, when God, who made her, cannot?" As straws show how the wind blows, so this little joke throws light on Stevenson 's state of mind toward womankind in general. During this heroine discussion, he remarked that he was always "unconscionably bored" by the conversation of young girls. He had no desire, it seems, to mould the young idea to his taste, as Horace, when he said:
"Place me where the world is not habitable,
Where the Day-God's Chariot too near approaches,