"Indeed, I care more for beauty than for usefulness," replied the æsthetic lady, with a fine smile.
"Beauty is indeed truly useful," said Paul, with a very faint imitation of Chrysophrasia's accent, "and it should be sought in everything. But that need not prevent us from seeing true beauty in all that is truly useful."
I had a faint suspicion that if Patoff had mimicked Miss Dabstreak in the first half of his speech, he had imitated me in the second portion of the sentiment. I do not like to be made game of, because I am aware that I am naturally pedantic. It is an old trick of the schools to rouse a pedant to desperate and distracted self-contradiction by quietly imitating everything he says.
"You are very clever at taking both sides of a question at once," said Hermione, with a smile.
"Almost all questions have two sides," answered Paul, "but very often both sides are true. A man may perfectly appreciate and approve of the opinions of two persons who take diametrically opposite views of the same point, provided there be no question of right and wrong involved."
"Perhaps," retorted Hermione; "but then the man who takes both sides has no opinion of his own. I do not like that."
"In general, cousin Hermione," said Paul, with a polite smile, "you may be sure that any man will make your opinion his. In this case, I submit that both beauty and usefulness are good, and that they need not at all interfere with each other. As for the compliment my aunt Chrysophrasia has paid to us Russians, I do not think we can be said to have gone very far in either direction as yet." After which diplomatic speech Paul dropped his eyeglass, and looked pleasantly round upon all three of us, as much as to say that it was impossible to draw him into the position of disagreeing with any one present by any device whatsoever.
IX.
Professor Cutter and I walked to the village that afternoon. He is a great pedestrian, and is never satisfied unless he can walk four or five miles a day. His robust and somewhat heavy frame was planned rather for bodily labor than for the housing of so active a mind, and he often complains that the exercise of his body has robbed him of years of intellectual labor. He grumbles at the necessity of wasting time in that way, but he never omits his daily walk.
"I should like to possess your temperament, Mr. Griggs," he remarked, as we walked briskly through the park. "You might renounce exercise and open air for the rest of your life, and never be the worse for it."