Lord Ivywood was looking with his cold, unconscious profile into a little black and yellow picture called “Enthusiasm”; but Joan Brett leaned across to him with swarthy eagerness and cried quite provocatively,
“Dorian says you’ve no pathos. Have you any pathos? He says it’s a sense of human limitations.”
Ivywood did not remove his gaze from the picture of “Enthusiasm,” but simply said “No; I have no sense of human limitations.” Then he put up his elderly eyeglass to examine the picture better. Then he dropped it again and confronted Joan with a face paler than usual.
“Joan,” he said, “I would walk where no man has walked; and find something beyond tears and laughter. My road shall be my road indeed; for I will make it, like the Romans. And my adventures shall not be in the hedges and the gutters, but in the borders of the ever advancing brain. I will think what was unthinkable until I thought it; I will love what never lived until I loved it—I will be as lonely as the First Man.”
“They say,” she said, after a silence, “that the first man fell.”
“You mean the priests?” he answered. “Yes, but even they admit that he discovered good and evil. So are these artists trying to discover some distinction that is still dark to us.”
“Oh,” said Joan, looking at him with a real and unusual interest, “then you don’t see anything in the pictures, yourself?”
“I see the breaking of the barriers,” he answered, “beyond that I see nothing.”
She looked at the floor for a little time and traced patterns with her parasol, like one who has really received food for thought. Then she said, suddenly,
“But perhaps the breaking of barriers might be the breaking of everything.”