“You must not consider money. There are ideals too.”
“I have no ideals.”
“Rickie!” she exclaimed. “Horrible boy!”
“No, Agnes, I have no ideals.” Then he got very red, for it was a phrase he had caught from Ansell, and he could not remember what came next.
“The person who has no ideals,” she exclaimed, “is to be pitied.”
“I think so too,” said Mr. Pembroke, sipping his coffee. “Life without an ideal would be like the sky without the sun.”
Rickie looked towards the night, wherein there now twinkled innumerable stars—gods and heroes, virgins and brides, to whom the Greeks have given their names.
“Life without an ideal—” repeated Mr. Pembroke, and then stopped, for his mouth was full of coffee grounds. The same affliction had overtaken Agnes. After a little jocose laughter they departed to their lodgings, and Rickie, having seen them as far as the porter’s lodge, hurried, singing as he went, to Ansell’s room, burst open the door, and said, “Look here! Whatever do you mean by it?”
“By what?” Ansell was sitting alone with a piece of paper in front of him. On it was a diagram—a circle inside a square, inside which was again a square.
“By being so rude. You’re no gentleman, and I told her so.” He slammed him on the head with a sofa cushion. “I’m certain one ought to be polite, even to people who aren’t saved.” (“Not saved” was a phrase they applied just then to those whom they did not like or intimately know.) “And I believe she is saved. I never knew any one so always good-tempered and kind. She’s been kind to me ever since I knew her. I wish you’d heard her trying to stop her brother: you’d have certainly come round. Not but what he was only being nice as well. But she is really nice. And I thought she came into the room so beautifully. Do you know—oh, of course, you despise music—but Anderson was playing Wagner, and he’d just got to the part where they sing