"You cannot possibly tell how you will feel twenty years hence—"
"Twenty years! That is a fair estimate, no doubt! I believe that the real secret of discontent has been the prospect of this cursed period of inaction. Nice substitute—coruscating as a blooming barrister; and it's mighty difficult to travel along for four years without showing your hand. It requires a tact that I may or may not have. If I have it, there may be other depths of hideous guile, as yet undiscovered. I have had glimpses of them already. All these farmers that I am nursing? What if my beneficent virus works too quickly—before I can represent them? Some other fellow reaps the benefit; and when my turn comes, likely as not there will be a reaction. I've to keep and increase my hold on these men of every nationality under the sun, as well as upon the seasoned old Americans, lest they should break away from me. Nice job I've cut out." He hesitated a moment, but added: "Beastly idea to subject all to the same law. It should be ten years for immigrants, and one for the man-of-the-world anxious to take the oath of allegiance—not that I am frantic to take it."
"I never knew any one so keen for obstacles; and now that you have found more than you bargained for—"
"It's not the obstacles that daunt me. If I were only sure of accomplishing any result worth while, if I had the materials to work on—if I were sure I cared! The American is an unhatched Englishman, but he won't be hatched out in my time——I even long for the close compact drama of English life. Everything is spread over such a vast loose surface here. These four years through which I may—must stumble along with my hands tied, are a fair example. And it seems to me that I never go to bed without seeing a face on the dark trying to enunciate: 'What for?' 'Why?'"
He sat down suddenly on a chair in front of her and took his head in his hands. "Do you ever ask yourself those questions?" he demanded, abruptly.
Isabel nodded. He noted absently that she looked like an elf with her face half-hidden by her hair, and that he could see but one little black mole, but a narrow ring of blue about the dilated pupils of her eyes, the tiny dimple at the corner of her mouth. She wore a loose blue wrapper, and the wood fire leaped in high flames behind her. The storm was terrific. He suddenly realized that this was the only homelike room he knew outside of England. He felt as if nothing would ever give him peace again, but he was suddenly and overwhelmingly glad to be there—and comfortably alone with Isabel on this raging night. He stared at her until his own pupils dilated, but she replied more tranquilly than she felt.
"Cui bono is the motto on Earth's coat of arms. The only thing that saves us is that we don't see it all the time. There are long intervals in which we eat and sleep and dance and love and play at politics and enjoy the storm—and our best companions."
"We certainly are not here to spend our lives preparing for another world. Otherwise there would be no sense in the complexities of civilizations. A man could do that much in a cave. It is merely the diabolism of instinct that prompts the young to believe that the race is all. Certainly love is not the only source of happiness. I have been ecstatically happy when writing—thinking, in the fever of composition that I was dashing out the finest thing in literature. I have been happy under fire, or excited enough to think so. And I have felt enough exultation with exaltation to make happiness when I have been on a platform and carried a hostile crowd off its head and to my feet. If two people were indescribably mated—I don't know—"
"Why not deliberately accept the doctrine that there is a purpose, even if you are not permitted to read the riddle of life—"
"All very well, but what have politics to do with it? You may answer that a man should lay up all the credits he can, and that he can possibly get more by cleaning out the political trough than in any other way. If those are my lines I suppose I shall work along them, but my higher faculties whisper that to live this life on the intellectual plane, fighting for your country when necessary, is the rational existence for those that have the luck to be born to the good things of the old civilizations. Here they don't know any better, or if they do they can't help themselves. If that plane isn't meant to live on, why is it there? Has a man the right deliberately to step off the high plane upon which a long succession of circumstances have planted him—pull up his roots and plant them in a virgin soil?"