"Of course," John assented. "It's no good being narrow about theaters, Stephen. You read books readily enough, and theaters are only living books, after all. There is no real difference."
"There is a difference in plays, though, as there is a difference in books," Stephen reminded him. "What about the play Miss Maurel is acting in now? She's a man's mistress in it, isn't she, and glories in it?"
John, who had been walking about the room, came and sat down opposite to his brother. He leaned a little forward.
"Stephen," he confessed, "I loathed that play the first night I saw it. I sha'n't forget how miserable I was. Louise was so wonderful that I could see how she swayed all that audience just by lifting or dropping her voice; but the story was a horror to me. The next day—well, she talked to me. She was very kind and very considerate. She explained many things. I try my best, now, to look at the matter from her point of view."
Stephen's eyes were filled for a moment with silent scorn. Then he knocked out the ashes from his pipe.
"You're content, then, to let the woman you want to make your wife show herself on the stage and play the wanton for folks to grin at?" he asked.
John rose once more to his feet.
"Look here, Stephen," he begged, a little wistfully, "it isn't any use talking like that, is it? If you have come here with evil things in your mind about the woman I love, we had better shake hands and part quickly. She'll be my wife some day, or I shall count my life a failure, and I don't want to feel that words have passed between us—"
"I'll say no more, John," Stephen interrupted. "I was hoping, when I came, that there might be a chance of seeing you back home again soon. It's going to be an early spring. There was June sunshine yesterday. It lay about the hillsides all day and brought the tender greens out of the earth. It opened the crocuses, waxy yellow and white, all up the garden border. The hedgerows down in the valley smelled of primrose and violets. Art and pictures! I never had such schooling as you, John, but there was old Dr. Benson at Clowmarsh—I always remember what he said one day, just before I left. I'd been reading Ruskin, and I asked him what art was and what it meant. 'My boy,' he answered, 'art simply represents man's passionate desire to drag the truth out of life in half a dozen different ways. God does it for you in the country!' They called him an ignorant man, old Benson, for a schoolmaster, but when I'd struggled through what I could of Ruskin, I came to the conclusion that he and I were something of the same mind."
"It's good to hear you talk like that, Stephen," John said earnestly. "You're making me homesick, but what's the sense of it? For good or for evil, I am here to wrestle with things for a bit."