Mr. Hurst was disconcerted. He took the cigar out of his mouth and examined the glowing tip which dilated in the dark as he stared at it. Tears had all at once come to his eyes. He wondered if he were drunker than he had imagined. The moment he suspected any one of a serious interest in him it robbed him of his aplomb. "Don't read me too well, Mrs. Farley. You know I'm not really much of a person. Coarse-fibered American type. No interests beyond business and all that. Good poker player. Hell of a good friend—when you let him. But commonplace. Damn commonplace. Nothing worth while at all from your point of view."
They strolled along the path further into the shadows. Julia was astonished by the ill-concealed emotion in Mr. Hurst's humorous voice. His transparency momentarily assuaged the tortures of her self-distrust. "How can you say that? My human predilections are not narrowed down to any particular type, I hope."
"Oh, well, I know—you and Catherine—miles over my head, all of it. Lectures on the Fourth Dimension. Some girl with adenoids here the other night been studying 'Einstein'. Damned if it had done her any good. Yes, what that gal needed was somebody to hug her." Julia was conscious that he was turning toward her. "Crass outlook, eh?" He laughed apologetically.
"She probably did," Julia said. They laughed together.
Mr. Hurst felt all at once unreasoningly depressed. He wanted to touch her as a child wants to touch the person who pleases it. But the sophisticated element in his nature intervened. He despised his own simplicity. "Do you find yourself getting anywhere in the pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful? Honestly now, Mrs. Farley. I've had the whole program shoved at me—not that Catherine isn't the best of women, bless her little soul. You know the life we tired business men lead pretty much resembles that of the good old steady pack horse that does the work. We dream about green pastures and all that, but never get much closer to it. And when you get to the end of things you begin to wonder if your plodding did anybody any good—if anything ever did anybody any good. I've got no use for cynicism—consider it damn cheap. Wish some time I was a little bit more of a cynic. But I'm lost. Hopelessly lost. I take a highball every now and then because my—I think my mind hurts." He halted suddenly and they were looking into each other's vague faces. "This talk getting too damn serious, eh? Something about you to-night that invites a fellow to make a fool of himself."
"I hope not," Julia said. "I like you for talking frankly."
"Oh, I'm not too damn frank. We can't afford it in this world of hard knocks. Now to you, now, I'm not saying all that I'd like to, by a jugful."
"Then you don't make as much of a distinction between me and the crowd as I hoped."
Charles had let his cigar go out. He kept turning it over and over in his stiff fingers that she could not see. He felt that only when he held a woman in his arms and she was robbed of her conventional defenses could he speak openly to her. With other attractive women he had come quickly to a point like this where he wanted to talk of his inner life. He imagined it would give him relief if he could touch Julia's dress and put his head in her lap. The terrible fear of revealing himself before his wife and her friends had stimulated his imagination toward abandon. When he was a child his mother had not loved him. She was a defiant person. She was ashamed of him because he allowed himself to be victimized by all the things against which she had futilely rebelled. He had felt himself despised though he had never understood the reason. His mother found continual fault with him and never petted him. One day a girl cousin much older than he had discovered him in a corner crying and had comforted him, and had allowed him to put his head in her lap. As he had never gotten over considering himself from a child's standpoint, his adult visions always culminated in a similar moment of release. Whenever he became sentimental about a woman he imagined that he would some day put his head in her lap. He had been, in his own mind, so thoroughly convicted of weakness that the development of strength no longer appealed to him as a means of self-fulfilment. He abandoned himself to an incurable dependence for which he had not as yet found a permanent object. It eased him when he could evoke the maternal in a mistress. "Aren't we all—somewhat on the defensive toward each other?" he said after a minute.
Julia was reminded again of what she thought to be her own tragedy. She felt reckless and wanted some one into whom to pour herself. She imagined herself lost in the dark garden, crushed between the walls and bright windows of the houses. In some indefinable way she identified herself with the million stars, flashing and remote in the black distance of the sky that showed narrowly above the roofs. "Yes," she said. "And so uselessly. People are so pathetic in their determination not to recognize what they are. If we ever had the courage to stop defending ourselves for a moment—But none of us have, I'm afraid." She carried the pity which she had for herself over to him. She had noticed how thin his face was, that the bold gaze with which he looked at her was only an expression of concealment, and that there were strained lines at the corners of his good-tempered mouth. Yes, in the depths of his pale eyes with their conscious glint of humor there was undoubtedly something eager and almost blankly disconcerted.