“Maybe,” said Stacey, with a short laugh.
“Because it isn’t only Vernon you’d have to destroy. Everything’s that way—unchanging. It has to be, I suppose, to endure. People have their own lives. They can’t change so very much. Even mothers don’t die because their sons have died. They suffer for a while, then forget. Vernon and the Middle-West shock you now because they’ve been too removed and too unimaginative to suffer at the war. They’ve scarcely felt the war. While you’ve been in places all raw with pain. But they, too, will get over it and be like Vernon. It isn’t Vernon you’d have to destroy. It’s all humanity.”
Stacey’s face was inscrutable. Not a muscle in it had moved. But his eyes had grown dark with a kind of shadow. “Maybe,” he said again quietly. “Come on! Let’s go.”
They went down the steps and along the brief board-walk to Stacey’s car, which was parked before the house.
Dinner was at seven, and they were in the living-room at ten minutes to. It was the one admonition Stacey had given Phil on the latter’s arrival the day before. “Do as you please in everything—only be on time at meals,” he had said.
Mr. Carroll was waiting for them, with cocktails ready to pour. He was in a genial mood and nodded appreciatively at the younger men’s promptness. “Pleasure to have to do with people who understand that seven means seven,” he observed. “You wouldn’t believe, Blair, the trouble I used to have with Stacey. He was almost as bad as his sister in his contempt for time.” He poured the cocktails. “Make them myself nowadays,” he explained. “I have profound respect for Parker, but I don’t want to strain his integrity too much. You can’t even trust the men at the club not to rifle one another’s lockers. Not that Parker wouldn’t make a more creditable member than a good many of them.”
They laughed.
“Dare say,” remarked Stacey. “But now this question of being on time,—I can see two sides to it.”
“Two?” his father exclaimed. “Not a bit of it! There’s only one side.”
“No, it’s a matter of two opposing theories of life. One is that you should always be on time so as to avoid inconveniencing one another and wasting energy and having dishes get cold. The other is that you shouldn’t worry too much about promptness or you let time get the upper hand of you and run your life.”