“Only to other people,” Stella argued, “not to myself. My dear Michael, you’ve no idea what a relief it is sometimes to play on the piano a composition that is really easy—ridiculously, fatuously easy.”
“But you wouldn’t choose that piece for public performance,” Michael pointed out. He was beginning to feel the grave necessity of checking Stella’s extravagance.
“Surely the public you saw gathered round me in Paris wasn’t very important?” She laughed in almost contemptuous remembrance.
“Then why did you wire for me if the whole affair was so trivial as you make out now?”
“I wanted a corrective,” Stella explained.
“But how am I a corrective outside the fact that I’m your brother? And, you know, I don’t believe you would consider that relationship had much to do with my importance one way or the other.”
“In fact,” said Stella, laughing, “what you’re really trying to do is to work the conversation round to yourself. One reason why you’re a corrective to George is that you’re a gentleman.”
“There you are!” cried Michael excitedly, and as if with that word she had released a spring that was holding back all the pent-up conclusions of some time past, he launched forth upon the display of his latest excavation of life. “We all half apologize for using the word ‘gentleman,’ but we can’t get on without it. People say it means nothing nowadays. Although if it ever meant anything, it should mean more nowadays than it did in the past, since every generation should add something to its value. I haven’t been able to talk this out before, because you’re the only person who knows what I was born and at the same time is able to understand that for me to think about my circumstances rather a lot doesn’t imply any very morbid self-consciousness. You’re all right. You have this astonishing gift which would have guaranteed you self-expression whatever you had been born. When one sees an artist up to your level, one doesn’t give a damn for his ancestors or his family or his personal features apart from the security of the art’s consummation. Perhaps I have a vague inclination toward art myself, but inclinations are no good without something to lean up against at the end. These people who came to your party that night in Paris are in a way much happier, or rather much more secure than me. However far they incline without support, they’re most of them inclining away from a top-heavy suburban life. So if they become failures, they’ll always have the consolation of knowing they had either got to incline outward or be suffocated.”
Michael stopped for a while and stared out through the cottage lattices at the stretch of common, at the steel-blue chain of ponds and the narrow portal that led to this secluded forest-world, and away down the lane to where on either side of the spraying brambles a plantation of delicate birch-trees was tinted with the diaphanous brown and gold and pale fawn of their last attiring.
“If I could only find in life itself,” said Michael, sighing, “a path leading to something like this cottage.”