"I have had the advantage," he said, "of many friendships with men whose names you would scarcely know, but who directed the intellectual tendencies of the younger generation of Parisians. People call us decadents—I suppose, because we prefer intellectual progression to physical activity. I am afraid, dear friend, that you would never be one of us."
"I am quite sure of it," Guy answered.
"You will not even drink absinthe," Henri continued, helping himself from a little carafe which stood between them, "absolutely the most artistic of all drinks. You prefer a thing you call a pipe to my choicest cigarettes, and you have upon your cheeks a color of which a ploughboy should be ashamed."
Guy laughed good-humoredly.
"Well, I can't help being sunburnt!" he declared. Henri sighed delicately.
"Ah, it is not only that," he said. "I wish so much that I could make you understand. You positively cultivate good health, take cold baths and walks and exercises to preserve it."
"Why the dickens shouldn't I?"
Henri half closed his eyes. He was a dutiful nephew, but he felt that another month with this clodhopper of an English boy would mean the snapping of his finely strung nerves.
"My friend," he began gently, "we in Paris of the set to whom I belong do not consider good health to be a state which makes for intellectual progression. Good health means the triumph of the physical side of man over the nervous. The healthy animal sleeps and eats too much. He does not know the stimulus of pain. His normal condition is unaspiring—not to say bovine. The first essential, therefore, of life, according to our tenets, is to get rid of superfluous health."
Guy did not trust himself to speak this time. He only stared at his companion, who seemed pleased to have evoked his interest.