“Not in our time,” Densley had said, encircling the departing ladies with a smile that was not only homage and benediction, but glee. Private glee over the addition to his store of anecdotes, of such a fine new specimen. He, at least, thought Miriam, as they rose from the table, would not regret the evening spent outside his world.
Michael, half risen, bowing towards the centre of the group, had something to say. One of his generalisations. The party was united at last.
“These speculations,” he announced to the group Miriam rejoiced to see not only arrested by the inevitable topic but charmed by his gentleness, feeling the pull of him in their midst, “are most-interesting. There are it is sure in these matters no absolute certainties, but what is sure is, that the realisation of this idea would be, not advance, but retrogression.”
“Hear, hear,” said Densley, in his smoothest girlish falsetto.
As they all went down Fleet Street on their way to the Lycurgan meeting, Miriam wondered whether she would be asked to resign from the club. But much more pressing than this question was the feeling that her party had, in bringing together three of her worlds, shown her more clearly than she had known it before, that there was no place for her in either one of them. So clearly that she now wished it could end and leave her to go to the meeting alone.
There was in Lycurgan meetings some sort of reality, either coming from the platform or more often from irrelevant things rising in her own mind as she sat surrounded by so many speculative minds.
But to-night she would not reach unconsciousness of her surroundings. And the ideas coming from the platform would be severely tested by these alien presences. Already in advance, these ideas looked like a mere caprice of her leisure hours, a more or less congenial background of thought upon which presently might emerge a sudden enlargement of her own life. More and more lately they had been growing to mean things shared with Hypo, bright with life because they were his, and for the same reason suspect, suspect because of his unrivalled expressiveness, a faculty that might be turned with equal conviction in a quite opposite direction.
And once they were in the hall and she was sitting with the serene worlds of Michael and Densley and the Taylors close to her, the urgency of all the Lycurgans stood for grew immediately less. This world of clear ideas summoning mankind to follow like an army, seemed again, as when she had first met it, to contain a trick, to be too clear, too hard, too logical to embrace the rich fabric of life. She experimented in unthinking it; and a silence fell on many of the flagrant cruelties of civilisation. They lost their voice. Their only educated, instructed voice. The Lycurgans were a league to arrest cruelties. But a cold, cynical, jesting league, cold and hard as thought, cynical as paganism and cultivating a wit that left mankind small and bleak, in a darkness where there was no hope but in intelligent scheming. Even the women. The Lycurgan women were all either as hopelessly logical as men, or methodically pink. And the men; the everlasting prize-fight, the perfect unsociability underlying their cold ideas. Except for one or two. And they were idealists, blind with the illusion that humanity moves with one accord.
Each one moves singly. To join the movements of others is harmful until you have moved yourself. Movement is with the whole of you. Ideas come afterwards.
How much time had passed? Only a moment or two. The chairman was still bleating. And they had not noticed her inattention.