“Well, I have done,” said Karl. “Excuse the—the Nonconformist conscience.”
Martin got up.
“I don’t see how one can care—really care—for music and live grossly,” he said. “Yet people appear to manage it. And mawkishness makes me feel sick,” he added with apparent irrelevance.
But Karl understood.
“Somebody has been trying to pet him,” he thought to himself.
They went upstairs to the music-room, and Martin stood before the fire a few moments smoking in silence.
“I like this room,” he said. “It makes me feel clean, like the November morning. I say, how is it that so many people, men and women alike, only think about one subject? Surely it is extraordinarily stupid of them, when there are so many jolly things in the world.”
“Ah, if the world was not full of extraordinarily stupid people,” remarked Karl, “it would be an enchanting place.”
“Oh, it’s enchanting as it is,” cried Martin, throwing off his preoccupation. “May I begin again at once? I want to get through a lot of work to-night. Heavens, there’s a barrel-organ playing ‘Cavalleria.’ Frank is going to introduce a bill next session, he says, putting ‘Cavalleria’ in public on the same footing as obscene language in public. He says it comes to the same thing.”
Stella Plympton about this time was giving a certain amount of anxiety to her parents. The amount, it is true, was not very great, because her father was a happily constituted man who was really incapable of feeling great anxiety except about large sums of money. Consequently, since the extremely large sums of money, all of which he had made, were most admirably invested, his life was fairly free from care. His wife also was quite as fortunate, her complexion was the only thing capable of moving her really deeply, and as she had lately found a new masseuse who was quite wonderful and obliterated lines with the same soft completeness with which bread-crumb removes the marks of lead-pencil, she also, for the present, stood outside the zone of serious trouble.