“Och, I never heard such a preposterous statement,” Nancy declared. “Why, think of the men who cherish hopeless passions all their lives.”
“For my part I can never understand a man’s cherishing a hopeless passion,” he declared. “I should feel so utterly humiliated by a woman’s refusal of her love that my own passion would be killed by it instantly. And the humiliation would be deepened by my knowledge of woman’s facility for falling in love, which is, of course, much greater than a man’s, as much greater as her fastidiousness and sensitiveness are less. To be refused by a woman, when one sees on what monstrous objects she is prepared to lavish her affection, seems to me terrible. Equally I do not understand why a woman, who after her childhood so rarely cherishes a hopeless passion that will never be returned, is always prepared to cherish the much more hopeless passion of continuing to love a man after he has ceased to love her. I suppose it’s because women are such sensualists. They always regard love as a gratification of self too long postponed, and they continue to want it as children want broken toys and men fail to give up smoking. The famous women who have held men have held them by their infinite variety. Yet the one quality in a lover that a woman finds it hardest to forgive is his variety.”
“Och, I don’t agree at all,” Nancy declared breathlessly. “In fact I don’t agree with anything you’ve said about love or men or women. I think it’s a great pity that you have let yourself grow middle-aged. You wouldn’t be able to have all these ideas if you were still capable of feeling genuine emotion. I’m not clever enough to argue with you properly. No woman ever can argue, because either she feels so strongly about a subject that all her reasons fly to the wind, or, if she doesn’t feel strongly, she doesn’t think it worth while to argue and, in fact, finds it a boring waste of time. But I feel that you are utterly wrong. I know you are. You’re just wrong. And that’s all there is to be said. My husband had more variety than any man I ever knew, and I loved his variety as much as I loved every other single one of his qualities.”
There were tears in her big deep-blue eyes, the tears that always came to them when she spoke of Bram, and flashing tears of exasperation as well, at being unable to defeat her companion’s cynicism, for all his observations seemed to her to be the fruit of a detestable and worldly-wise cynicism, the observations of a man who has never known what it was to suffer or to lose anything in the battle of life.
“Forgive me if I spoke thoughtlessly,” said Kenrick. “I get carried away by my tongue whenever I go to an opera. Operas stimulate me. They are the reductio ad absurdum of art. I seem always to get down to the bedrock of the æsthetic impulse at the opera. We are deluded by a tragedy of Æschylus into supposing that art is something greater than it is, something more than a sublimation of childhood’s games, something comparable in its importance to science. In opera we see what a joke art really is. We know that in the scroll of eternity the bottle-washer of a great chemist is a more conspicuous minuscule than the greatest artist who ever shall be.”
“I think I’m too tired to listen to you any longer,” Nancy said. “I really don’t understand anything you’re talking about now, and even if I did I feel sure I wouldn’t agree with you.”
Kenrick laughed.
“I plead guilty to being a chatterbox to-night. But it was partly your fault. You shouldn’t have sat there looking as if you were listening with such intelligence. But let’s leave generalisations and come to particulars. Gambone says a little holiday will do you good.”
“I don’t believe you,” Nancy laughed. “Maestro Gambone never indulged in theories about his pupils’ well-being. I simply don’t believe you.”
“Yes, really he did. I asked him if he did not think that you would be all the better for a short rest, and he agreed with me. Now, why don’t you come to Sorrento with me and see in this New Year that is going to be your annus mirabilis?”