Trite words, certainly, and none of her hearers felt their force. Her other daughter kissed her warmly, her son-in-law escorted her to the foot of the stairs, and her stout, black-clad figure was seen ascending, wearily, a little bent.
She puzzled Vincelle; she had no elegance; he felt sure that his mother would call her “ordinary.” Yet there was about her a dignity, an authority, he had never seen surpassed. And her way of entertaining you had a sort of vigour and originality about it; he felt that she didn’t care much what other people did, or what was correct, but was concerned only with comfort, gaiety, and this unostentatious, invincible dignity of hers.
“Come on!” said Claudine, and they all followed her across the hall.
A new mood had settled upon them; they weren’t conscious of being tired, but they were, all of them, subdued, inclined to a pleasant seriousness. The room was shadowy, except for a hanging gas lamp above the table, and the glow of the fire. They sat about the table, hungry in spite of the hearty supper they had consumed a few hours ago, and the young man in spectacles began to talk in an unaccountable and eccentric fashion about Pre-historic Man, and drew a picture of him, cowering and shivering on such nights as this.
“A life of incessant fear,” he said. “Imagine that. Never to know security. Never to see any possibility of safety. No chance of old age.”
Vincelle listened, but he felt vaguely that Pre-historic Man was rather blasphemous and Darwinian and free-thinking. It was also displeasing to observe that Claudine was interested.
“It’s safety that’s made us develop, isn’t it, Lance?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“It’s safety that’s making us decline,” he said. “It’s making us soft and weak and dull.”
“But if we weren’t secure, we couldn’t have any art,” said Claudine.