“I did, much too seriously. I don’t take things seriously now; I have lost the trick. But how I long to be able to! I was mad, no doubt: you often told me so. But it was a very sweet madness. All enthusiasm is madness according to you. But according to enthusiasts, enthusiasm is the only sanity. I oughtn’t to complain. I sail closer to the shore. It is really much safer and pleasanter. Indeed, we are thinking of taking a house at Cambridge. It will be nice to have Ted near. If one wants to be happy, one ought to have no ill-balanced enthusiasms. They are very disturbing while they last, and they leave one as flat as a pancake. But when you have once tasted them, though you may have lost them entirely, you can never wholly forget their wonderful intoxication. One of those French enthusiasts says that one must be drunk on something—on life or love, or virtue or vice, it does not matter which.”
“I, too, am very catholic,” murmured Manvers, “I appreciate virtue as little as I dislike vice. It is all a question of temperament.”
“Yes, temperament. That is another thing I have unlearned. There was a time when I was convinced that no man need be in the clutch of his temperament. I believed that one was free. One is not. One is in endless, hopeless bondage to one’s temperament.”
“You are pessimistic this afternoon.”
“It is a relative term. I am really optimistic, though I allow my optimism would have seemed pessimism to me three years ago.”
“I don’t quite see from what standpoint you can be considered optimistic,” remarked Manvers.
“I appreciate fully all I have got. I think the lines are laid for me in pleasant places. That is surely the whole essence of optimism. I believe that everything is for the best, and that if the best seems second-rate to me, it is I who am wrong. I love May more than I love any one in this world, and she is my wife. I have money, which is a hateful necessity, but as necessary as it is hateful. And I have a good digestion.”
Tom leant back and beat out the ashes from his pipe against the side of the boat. They would not come out at first, but eventually the whole dottel of the pipe fell into the water with a subdued hiss. Some vague note of thought twanged in his brain, and he paused for a moment, frowning slightly, and trying to catch the remembrance which the sound had stirred. After a little he smiled rather sadly, and not with the completeness which a smile of pure amusement or of pure happiness has in it.
“I used to do that over King’s bridge at Cambridge,” he said irrelevantly; “and I thought it seemed so like what I was going to do myself. I meant to go through darkness, and then make a splash.”
“The end of your pipe made a very little splash,” said Manvers.