"Sunshine means hope," declared Leander Prawle. "It means evolution, development, progress."
"Art is art!" cried Trevor. "Sing of what you please, so long as your technique is good, so long as you have the right chic, the right façon, the right way of putting things!"
"True," said Corson. "I write of skulls and corpses because you can get new effects out of them. They haven't been done to death, like faith, and philanthropy, and freedom. Optimism is so tiresome, nowadays. All the Greeks are dead. Nôtre Dame stands intact, but the Parthenon is a ruin."
Leander Prawle shivered. "You can make clever rhymes about charnel-houses," he said, "but that is not poetry. You can deplore the allurements of women with green eyes and stony hearts, but you degrade womanhood while you do so. You"—
"Are you not bored?" whispered Kindelon, in his mellow Irish brogue to Pauline, as he just then stole to her side. "If so, let us walk away together."
Pauline slipped her hand into his proffered arm. "I was not bored," she said, as they moved off, "but I was just beginning to be. Are there nothing but belligerent poets here to-night?"
"Oh, you will find other sorts of people."
"But, who are these three wranglers, Mr. Trevor, Mr. Prawle, and Mr. Corson?"
Kindelon laughed. "They are fanatics," he said. "Each one believes himself a Milton in ability."
"Are they successful?"