“Have you idled away your whole life?” she asked. “Do you never intend to do anything?”
“Do you think it is doing nothing to spend five years in the study of Europe?”
“But what are you going to do with it all? Just keep it in your head?”
“What would you have me do with it? Put it in a book and inflict it on the world?”
“Yes. Give yourself some definite object in life. I have no respect for people who just drift along—who have no ambition nor aim.”
“Well, I will tell you something if you will promise not to betray me,” he said, quickly: “I am writing a book.”
“No?” exclaimed Hermia. “Actually? Tell me about it. Is it a novel? a book of travels?”
“Neither. It is a series of lives of certain knights of Norman days about whom there are countless fragmentary legends, but nothing has ever been written. I am making a humble endeavor to reproduce these legends in the style and vernacular of the day and in blank verse. Imagine a band of old knights, broken-down warriors, hunted to the death, and hiding in a ruined castle. To while away the time they relate their youthful deeds of love and war. Do you like the idea?”
Hermia leaned forward with her eyes expanded to twice their natural size. “Do you mean to tell me,” she said, “that you care for the past—that its romance appeals to you?”
Quintard threw himself back in his chair and raised his eyebrows a little. “I have gone so far, I may as well confess the whole thing,” he said. “I would have lived in the feudal ages if I could. Love and war! That is all man was made for. Everything he has acquired since is artificial and in the way. He has lost the faculty of enjoying life since he has imagined he must have so much to enjoy it with. Let a man live for two passions, and he is happy. Let him have twenty ways of amusing himself, and he lowers his capacity for enjoying any one in the endeavor to patronize them all.”