“I’m going to laugh,” said Peter at length.
“No, please don’t,” said Silvia. “If you do I shall cry.”
Peter tapped the sheets that lay in her hand.
“But it’s gorgeous,” he said. “I should laugh, if I did, not from amusement—though there are amusing things—but from pleasure. Every word in that letter is true; that’s something to be pleased about, and, what’s more, every word in it is right. But the surprise, the wonder of it! There’s a splendour about it!”
Silvia shuffled the sheets together, and, giving them back to him, leaned her forehead on her hands.
“Ah, haven’t you got any tenderness?” she said. “Don’t you see the bitter pathos of it? Your mother, you know!”
“But she says there is nothing pathetic about it,” said he.
“And that’s just the most pathetic thing of all!” Silvia said.
Peter puzzled over this a moment. He understood Silvia’s feeling well enough, but he understood equally well, and with greater sympathy, the answer (the retort almost) to it.
“But if she sees nothing pathetic in the situation, and I quite agree with her, what’s the use of trying to introduce pathos?” he asked. “Pathos painted on—like a varnish—ceases to be pathos at all; it becomes simply sentimentality.”