“That,” said Ascher, “is not quite what my wife means. The gifts which a city or a country give to the world must be of a more permanent kind if they are to be of real value. Ships, linen, tobacco, we use them, and in using we destroy them. They have their value, but it is not a permanent value. Ultimately a city will be judged not by its perishable products, but by——”
“Art,” said Mrs. Ascher.
I might have known it. Mrs. Ascher would be sure to judge cities, as she judges men, by their achievement in that particular line. I was bound to admit that the reputation of Belfast falls some way short of that of Athens as a centre of literature and art.
“Or thought,” said Ascher, “or criticism. It is curious that a community which is virile and fearless, which is able to look at the world and life through its own eyes, which is indifferent to the general consensus of opinion——”
“Belfast is all that,” I said. “I never knew any one who cared less what other people said and thought than Malcolmson.”
“Yet,” said Ascher, “Belfast has done nothing, thought nothing, seen nothing. But perhaps that is all to come. The future may be, indeed I think must be, very different.”
Ascher will never be a real leader of men. His habit of seeing two sides of every question is an incurable weakness in him. Mrs. Ascher does not suffer in that way. She saw no good whatever in Belfast, nor any hope for its future.
“Never,” she said, “never. A people who have given themselves over to material things, who accept frankly, without even the hypocrite’s tribute to virtue, the money standard of value, who ask ‘Does it pay?’ and ask nothing else—— Have you ever been in Belfast?”
“Yes,” I said, “often. The churches are ugly, decidedly ugly, though comfortable.”
Mrs. Ascher shuddered.