Stacey showed some interest in this. “That’s rather profound,” he observed appreciatively. “Hope you don’t do that sort of thing with me.”
Mrs. Latimer smiled. “I have to,” she remarked, “since you won’t.” Again there was a silence. “Stacey,” she said abruptly, “I’m so very sorry you happened into that terrible affair in Omaha. It seems to me sometimes that some ugly fate is dogging you, to single out everything evil and say: ‘Here! Don’t overlook this! Here’s something really horrid!’ It isn’t fair! It simply isn’t fair!” she concluded, almost passionately.
Stacey raised his eyebrows. “It’s awfully good of you to be so considerate of me,” he replied. “I appreciate it.” (And, indeed, he tried to.) “Philip Blair said the same thing last evening—by the way, I’m very glad you’ve taken to going around there—but really there’s nothing to be perturbed about. I’m not changed by Omaha. This was no worse than a thousand things I saw, almost daily, in France. Worse? It was nothing!” Suddenly his face twitched. “If you’d seen my friend, Gryce, die!” He drew his hand across his forehead. “Come!” he said. “One doesn’t talk of things like that.”
Mrs. Latimer’s face had looked perplexed and doubtful at Stacey’s initial coolness; it became grave again and affectionately apprehensive now.
“It isn’t,” she said gently, “that anything you have seen is worse than what you saw in France. It is only the persistent hammering on the same theme.”
“Oh,” he replied, in a hard voice, “I suppose you think I’m being steadily turned into some kind of red revolutionary. Not at all! Quite the opposite, in fact. When I see what there is in men beneath the crust I’m all for preserving the crust—any old crust—the one we’ve got, even!”
She gazed at him sadly. “I wish you’d go away for a while,” she murmured.
“Go away?” he returned. “I can’t go away from myself, can I? I’m just like the rest—with a crust.”
Suddenly one of his hot unreasoning rages swept over him, like a physical thing climbing from his feet to his head.
“It’s no good to do away with myself,” he said in an odd resonant voice, but not loud. “That’s too little. I’d blow up everything with myself—every one—my father with his bigoted prehistoric ideas, your husband with his petulant selfishness, Marian, stony at one moment, sentimentalizing prettily over a rose-petal the next,—all men, all women! And rebuild things? Never! Let them go smash, end, vanish, and leave clean empty space!”