“In the same way as one envies people who grow beards, when one is shaving in the morning,” said Tom. “I wouldn’t ever really grow one myself. But I envied the birds to whom such a hollow was native and natural.”
Markham laughed.
“Birds and beards—what metaphor are you going to employ next?”
Tom stood in front of him, smoking meditatively.
“If the green hollow satisfies you, you are right to live there always; but one cannot be two people. I couldn’t live there always. I said just now I was in love with cows and country life. So I am; but if I knew there was nothing else, I should be absolutely wretched. Of course, every human being is a mass of limitations, saddled with the idea that he can be unlimited, and, personally, I can’t limit myself to living always in the green hollow, and any one who can seems to me necessarily more limited than I. A man is judged by his power of desire. To desire much is better than to desire little.”
“You are not very convincing,” remarked Ted.
“No one has ever convinced anybody of anything, except by triumphant achievement of some sort,” said Tom, “and because I call you a bird in a green hollow, I shan’t convince you you had better have been a man, or that I am one either. But what I mean is this. We are all human beings, and we ought to live in a human environment. We differ from beasts chiefly because we have high and intelligible emotions. It is our duty to mix with all sorts of people, to know what every one is thinking about, to be ecstatically miserable, to be ecstatically happy, and to fall in love.”
“Oh, that part of human life is well looked after,” said Markham; “it is almost universal to fall in love. I suppose, by the way, that you are going off now because your ten minutes—or was it five—in the green hollow is over?”
Markham spoke rather bitterly. These two days had been very pleasant to him, and Tom’s delightful habit of falling back at once into his old relations with every one made him feel that his own circle had narrowed, while Tom’s had widened, and his remarks about green hollows had emphasized this.
Tom looked up.