His voice pleaded his cause as words could not; and there was a certain compulsion in it also. Emily felt that she wished to yield, that it would be at once unkind and absurd not to yield, and that she must yield. The impression of mastering strength was new and, to her surprise, agreeable.
“Why not?” she said slowly in French, regarding him with unmistakable straightforwardness and simplicity. “I am depressed. I am alone. I have been looking inside too much. Let us see. What do you propose?”
“We might go to the Louvre. It is near, and perhaps we can think of something while we are there.”
They walked to the Louvre, he talking appreciatively of France and the French people. He showed that he thought her a Frenchwoman and she did not undeceive him. She could not decide what his occupation was, but felt that he must be successful, probably famous, in it. “He is not so tall after all,” she said to herself, “not much above six feet. And he must be about forty-five.”
As they went through the long rooms, she found that he knew the paintings and statuary. “You paint?” she asked.
“No,” he replied with an impatient shrug. “I only talk—talk, talk, talk, until I am sick of myself. Again, I am compelled to listen—listen to the outpourings of vanity and self-excuse and self-complacence until I loathe my kind. It seems to me that it is only in France that one finds any great number of people with a true sense of proportion.”
“But France is the oldest, you know. It inherited from Greece and Rome when the rest of Europe was a wilderness.”
“And we inherited a little from France,” he said. “But, unfortunately, more from England. I think the strongest desire I have is to see my country shake off the English influence—the self-righteousness, the snobbishness. In England if a man of brains compels recognition, they hasten to give him a title. Their sense of consistency in snobbishness must not be violated. They put snobbishness into their church service and create a snob-god who calls some Englishmen to be lords, and others to be servants.”
“But there is nothing like that in America?”
“Not officially, and perhaps not among the mass of the people. But in New York, in one class with which my—my business compels me to have much to do, the craze for imitating England is rampant. It is absurd, how they try to erect snobbishness into a virtue.”