"You don't know what gossip is," he said, thinking of Eleanor. "I ignore real gossip."
Miss Hamilton smiled to herself.
CHAPTER XIII
AFTER the Christmas party at Ambles John managed to secure a tranquillity that, however brief and deceptive he felt it was like to be, nevertheless encouraged him sufficiently to make considerable progress with the play while it lasted. Perhaps Eleanor's warning had sunk deeper than she might have supposed from the apparent result of that little chat with her brother-in-law about his future; at any rate, he was so firmly determined not to give the most evil mind the least opportunity for malicious exaggeration that in self-defense he devoted to Joan of Arc a more exclusive attention than he had hitherto devoted to any of his dramatic personages. Moreover, in his anxiety to prove how abominably unjust the insinuations of his family were, he imparted to his heroine some of his own temporary remoteness from the ordinary follies and failings of humanity.
"We are too much obsessed by sex nowadays," he announced at the club one afternoon, and was tempted to expatiate upon his romantic shibboleth to several worn out old gentlemen who had assented to this proposition. "After all," he argued, "life is not all sex. I've lately been enormously struck by that in the course of my work. Take Joan of Arc for instance. Do we find any sex obsession in her? None. But is she less psychologically interesting on that account? No. Sex is the particular bane of modern writers. Frankly, I cannot read a novel nowadays. I suppose I'm old-fashioned, but I'd rather be called old-fashioned than asked to appreciate one of these young modern writers. I suppose there's no man more willing than myself to march with the times, but I like the high roads of literature, not the muddy lanes...."
"The John Longs and John Lanes that have no turnings," a club wag put in.
"Look at Stevenson," the dramatist continued, without paying any attention to the stupid interruption. "When Stevenson wrote a love scene he used to blush."
"So would any one who had written love scenes as bad as his," sniggered a young man, who seemed oblivious of his very recent election to the club.
The old members looked at him severely, not because he had sneered at Stevenson, but because, without being spoken to, he had volunteered a remark in the club smoking-room at least five years too soon.
"I've got a young brother who thinks like you," said John, with friendly condescension.