“I want to talk some more about that other thing. I thought, as I stood by the creek, of our literature. Has it occurred to you that no American author has ever written a genuine all-round love scene? They are either thin or sensual, almost invariably the former. The soul and passion of the older races they have never developed. If a woman writer breaks out wildly sometimes, she merely voices the lack we all feel in this section of the world—in life as well as in literature. That explains why I have tried to care for eight clever and interesting men and turned away chilled.”
“You must love an Englishman,” said Clive, smiling. “If you notice, a good many American women do. An Englishwoman never marries an American. It goes to prove what I said a little while ago: leisure is needed for development; consequently the women of America have developed far more rapidly than the men.”
“Don’t imagine for a moment that I am disparaging my own country,” said Helena hurriedly; “I am the best American in the world—I wouldn’t be anything else; and I like and admire our men for their cleverness and pluck and wonderful go-aheadness. But I will confide to you something that I have never told a living soul—I have such a contempt for the Anglomaniac that I have a horror of being taken for one. It is this: something English in me has survived through five generations. I was brought up in a library of English literature; perhaps that fostered it. As long as I merely read and studied I lived in imagination among English scenes and people—the people of your history and those created by your authors and poets. Something in me responded to every line that I read; I felt at home; singularly enough much more so than when I finally visited England. Until a few years ago I could not force myself to read American literature—with the sole exception of Bret Harte. It is so cold, so slight, so forbidding. It is the piano of letters. Now, of course, I appreciate the mentality in it and the delicate art, the light rapid sketches of passing phases. And it seems to me that before we produce a Shakspere or Byron we shall have to relapse into barbarism, and emerge and develop by slow and sure stages to the condition of England when she evolved her great men. We have gone ahead too fast to ever become great from our present beginnings; we are all brilliant shallows and no depths.”
“You disprove a good deal that you say.”
Helena bent forward, pressing her chin hard into the palm of her hand. She had forgotten that she was a beautiful woman, but even so she was graceful.
“If we Californians have a stronger fibre and richer blood in us than other Americans,” she replied, “it is because we are cruder, savager, close to nature. I do things that no Eastern girl in the same social position would even think of doing, much less dare; but, on the other hand, I have a better chance of getting what I want out of life, for I go straight for it, undeterred by any traditions or scruples. And I have more to give.”
She paused and Clive filled and lit another pipeful of tobacco.
“You take great satisfaction out of that pipe,” she said pettishly.
“It is my only safeguard.”
She laughed and he could see her flush.