“Ay,” grunted Derwent. “We are above the revelation of Christ; but our clever women talk glibly of theosophy, and go into fashionable crazes over imported Buddhist priests; and nobody is afraid of being damned.”
“What is theosophy, Mr. Derwent?” said Marion Lenoir. “Something to do with spirit-rapping, isn’t it?—or palmistry?”
“I am sure,” said Mrs. Malgam, “I was always brought up to go to church; but when I was first married, Mr. Ten Eyck didn’t care for it.”
“The only advantage should be, that the general smash gives us at least a chance at personal liberty. But most of these fads start in my place; and in Boston the masses are more philistine than almost anywhere,” said Caryl Wemyss.
“There is some strength in Philistinism,” said Sewall, curtly. “What I can’t stand is the critical crowd, the cousins of the nephews of the friends of Emerson, who now talk sagely of the fine art of their boarding-house literature, of the tea-table realism school—what Poe called, the Frog-pond weakly school. They are too delicate to take life straight, at most they can only stomach a criticism of a critique of humanity, as we give babies peptonized preparations of refined oatmeal. Their last fad is pure government. Pure government!” repeated Sewall, with a snort of disgust.
“It is the literature of the decadence, of course,” said Wemyss; “an emasculated type, product of short-haired women and long-haired men, gynanders and androgynes. I have often myself thought of writing another novel—if only for the sake of putting a great, horrid man into it. But gentlemen should all the more have courage to reassert their essence. It is an age, after all, when one may lead a full life. There is a fine passage somewhere in Zola, where the lips of two lovers are unsealed at the approach of death. So we, on the eve of the destruction of society, are free to live our lives elementally; enforced to idleness, like patricians in the fall of Rome.”
“Mr. Wemyss, do you know my definition of a Boston man?” cried Sewall, who had had an evident struggle to repress himself during this speech.
“No,” said Wemyss, respectfully sipping a glass of Yquem.
“An Essay at Life,” said Sewall, hurling the words at Wemyss like a missile.
There was a certain pause and then Derwent was heard softly quoting Dante’s “gran rifiuto.”