Yet Sylvia, waiting here for the beginning of the heartless drama that would be wrought of her heart's blood pulsing to reinforce her will, rejoiced in this sterility of the setting; it helped her to achieve a similar effect in her own attitude. Just as this room had succeeded in preserving itself from any impression of having ever been lived in by human beings, so she, when the drama was played through, should retain of it no trace. That in it which was real—the lust of man—should be left behind, an ignominious burned-out thing less than a cigarette stump at the bottom of a china bowl.
The waiter came in with a basket of cakes, the cold and sugary forms of which were no more capable than the dahlias of imparting life to the merciful deadness. And how dead it all was! Those red-plush curtains eternally tied back in symmetrical hideousness—they had never lived since the time when some starved and withered soul had sewn those pompons along their edges one after another, pompons as numerous and monotonous as the days of their maker. Indeed, there was not a single piece of furniture, not an ornament nor a drapery, that was not stamped with the hatred of its maker. There was no trace of the craftsman's joy in his handiwork either in thread or tile or knob. There was nothing except the insolence of profit and the dreary labor of slaves. Yet a world stifled by such ugliness talked with distasteful surprise of men who profited by war. With the exploitation of the herd and the sacrifice of the individual that was called civilization what else could be expected? Nowadays even man's lust had to be guaranteed pure and unadulterated like his beer. Better that the whole human race should rot on dunghills with the diseases they merited than that they should profit from an added shame imposed upon the meanest and most miserable tinker's drab. People were shocked at making a hundred per cent. upon a shell to blow a German to pieces; but they regarded with equanimity the same profit at the expense of a child's future. Wherever one looked, there was nothing but material comfort set as the highest aim of life at the cost of beauty, religion, love, childhood, womanhood, virtue—everything. Then two herds met in opposition, and there was war; the result had made everybody uncomfortable, and everybody had declared there must never again be war. But so long as the individual submitted to the herd, war would go on; and the most efficient herd with the greatest will for war would succeed because it would be able to offer greater comfort at the time and higher profits afterward. Yet the individual had nearly always much that was admirable; the most sordid profiteer possessed a marvelous energy and perception that might be turned to good, if he could but realize that virtue is the true egotism and that vice is only a distorted altruism.
"I've always hated ants and loathed bees," Sylvia cried. "And in certain aspects the human race makes one shudder with that sense of co-operative effort running over one which I believe is called formication."
The waiter came in to announce M. Florilor's arrival.
"Now we get the individual at his worst just when I've been backing him against the herd. This is formication spelled with an 'n.'"
Stefan Florilor resembled a figure in a picture by Guido Reni. A superficial glance would have established him as a singularly handsome, well-built, robust, and attractive young man; a closer regard showed that his good looks owed too much to soft and feminine contours, that the robustness of his frame was only the outward form of strength with all the curves but nothing of the hardness of muscle, and that his eyes flashed not as the mirrors of an inward fire, but with liquid gleams of sensuous impressions caught from outside. He really was extremely like one of Guido Reni's triumphant and ladylike archangels.
They talked in French, a language that Florilor spoke without distinction, but with a pothouse fluency—no doubt much as one of Guido Reni's archangels might have picked it up from one of Guido Reni's devils.
"What a fatally seductive language it is!" Sylvia exclaimed at last, when she had complimented him as he evidently expected to be complimented upon his ease. "Whenever I hear a tea-table conversation in French I suspect every one of being a poet or a philosopher: whenever I read a French poet I want to ask him if he likes his tea strong or weak."
"Your friend is English also?" Florilor inquired.
He took advantage of the ethnical turn in the conversation to express his own interest in a problem of nationality.