“No indeed, and you put it very nicely,” she said more comfortably. “Isn’t it nice that we do not believe in duty? But we shall miss them. They were very nice playmates for us, as well as for each other—Nolan, there was something sort of sweet about Lem, after all? Something very human and lovable and—but of course it was Miriam’s duty to be happy.”
CHAPTER XIII
SHE FINDS A FOREIGNER
Eveley had very nearly lost faith in assimilation. She had thought it over carefully, attempted it conscientiously and decided it could not be done.
“One individuality can not be absorbed by another,” she would say very sagely. “Whether it is husbands and wives, or whether it is nations. The theorists are right in stating that America is for Americans only, and that it is the patriotic duty of those who come here to be Americanized as rapidly as possible, and the duty of the regular Americans to Americanize everybody else at top speed—but it can not be done. They are they, and we are we. It may be our duty, but we are not big enough.”
She did not call her friendship with Angelo Moreno by any such big and formal term as assimilation. They had just grown to be enormously good friends. She had forgotten about Americanizing him, but she found him charming, with the fresh frank abandon of the unspoiled south-European. She liked his open admiration, she enjoyed his mature cynicism, she reveled in his buoyant enthusiasm. She had not believed that such opposing elements could dwell in one small person. In Angelo, she found them, and she found the combination good.
He was helpful to Eveley, as well as pleasing. He did endless small jobs for her about the car and upon the lawn of her home. And when she noticed that he quickly adopted some of her own little customs of speech and manner, she was freshly pleased and interested.
Still she could not harden her heart to the clamorous call of the world struggle. She lived so happily and so securely in her Cloud Cote, going to business by day, doing her small bits of housework in between whiles, frolicking with her friends, chumming with Angelo, playing with her sister’s babies, running about in her pretty car. It was like living in the clouds indeed, with the world of chaos beneath. For there was the struggle of reconstruction going on, the tremendous heave and pull of masses seeking to dominate, the subtle writhe and twist of politics, a whole world straining and sinewing to rise dominant out of the molten bed of human lava left from the volcanic eruption of war.