Well, she was a sentimentalist, no doubt, but she was no fool, Stacey admitted to himself. Come to think of it, he was being Byronic in his intense antagonistic desire to stand alone, freed from all ties.
CHAPTER IV
Mr. Latimer was talking, although it was early afternoon and therefore not his best hour.
“The supreme importance of the arts,” he said, “is poise. There is no poise in life itself. Life is mere tumult and shouting. And since there is no poise there is no meaning. The arts hover above the hurly-burly, dipping down into it a little for delicate nourishment, but no more of it than a cloud, which sucks its constituent vapor from the earth, is of the earth. In the country of the arts there is quiet. That is to say,” he added drily, “there was. The arts at the moment have ceased to exist, and with them has vanished all that we possessed of value.”
“No doubt,” Stacey assented politely.
But the beautifully enunciated phrases really gave him a feeling of contempt for Mr. Latimer. And he wondered how he could ever have admired this polished esthete. His glance wandered to Marian (the only other person in the room, her mother being out somewhere) who was curled up in a large chair on the other side of her father. Stacey considered the girl’s face attentively. She stirred him by her beauty, especially when seen thus, motionless, carved; yet left him, when everything was summed up, feeling actively hostile.
Mr. Latimer had taken a small vase from the mantelshelf and was toying with it abstractedly.
“Leisure,” he remarked, “is anathema to Americans. Yet leisure is all there is of importance. It is what all men strive to attain through labor, but, having attained, are incapable of supporting. It is too noble for their tawdry energetic minds, and they hasten to fill it up with meaningless movement. They even, I am told, go to witness what they call ‘photo-plays,’ where, though themselves sitting still, they can enjoy a vicarious restlessness and be saved from the leisure they dread. How false an understanding of life, or, rather, what complete lack of any understanding! The goal of life itself is, after all, just the eternal leisure of the grave.”
“An admirable epigram,” said Stacey, with no hint of expression in his face. “I cannot make out whether it belongs spiritually in the eighteenth century or in the nineties of the last century.”
“In any case it does not belong in the twentieth,” Mr. Latimer returned, a touch of irascibility in his voice. “Nor do I.” He set the vase down almost with a bump. “I must go,” he said. “I have an appointment, and here in America every one is always on time.” And he left them.