“I know enough about myself to see that I’m not like that. And what results? That any glimpse of truth is condemned as rotten, abnormal, pathological. For the movies are only a glowing example of a spirit that corrupts everything. Why, if a novelist were to take any man alive—I don’t say me, but somebody better—Jimmy Prout, for instance—and tell the whole truth about him, the ghastly things he did and the ghastlier ones he wanted to do but didn’t dare, what a row there’d be! The reviewers would call the book abominable, the hero a hopeless rotter, though every one of them has done or wanted to do things just as bad. A movie world, Mrs. Latimer! No truth in it!”
“Yes,” she said, “no doubt. I’d like it different, honester. But what harm does the pretence do? It even sets a standard of a sort, doesn’t it?”
“What harm?” he cried. “Why, it makes people shocked at German atrocities, as though they were sins committed by some alien inhuman monsters. Down with Prussianism? As much as you like! I’m glad we beat the Germans. So far, so good. But how about the Prussianism in ourselves? A movie world! A smug, lying, movie world!”
“But there is kindliness in it, too,” she said wistfully, “and generosity. I’ve met them both.”
“Yes,” Stacey assented somberly, “there is—in sudden impulses, more frequent, I’ll even concede, than these passing gusts of bestiality. But, so far as I can see, there’s only one real force, one motive, in life, that stays on and on and never dies. Greed!” he concluded fiercely.
Mrs. Latimer gazed at him for a moment in silence.
“And still you don’t see it all,” she said at last very gently. “You won’t look deeply enough into yourself. If you did you’d see the splendid spectacle of the human soul fighting all this that you describe—and without quarter, dear Stacey, as long as you have breath in you. Has your hatred of greed and lies no significance?”
“I don’t know,” he replied, drawing his hand across his forehead. “And I don’t see that I’m doing any splendid fighting. I don’t know what to fight. I merely fume impotently.” But the wild look of pain had disappeared from his eyes.
He fell to wondering about his companion. No optimist, surely. Doubtful of most things, but sweet and mellow in her skepticism. How had she attained such serenity?
“You must know Catherine, my friend Philip Blair’s wife,” he said suddenly. “You will like her, and she you. There’s truth in the hearts of both of you, and yet you’re different, somehow.”