“But surely,”—leaning forward with ill-concealed eagerness—“the future is just brimming over with interest and possibilities for you.”
“Why for me particularly?”
“I was thinking of your brains, and your money, and your position—why you have everything to make life interesting.”
He shrugged his shoulders, and the expression on his thin cynical mouth was not pleasant.
“Oh, I don’t know about that. It’s too much bother altogether. I’ve seen behind the scenes too much to care; it’s all rather rotten at the core, you know—everything is.”
Eileen looked pained, and gazed away to her beloved mountains. “I am sorry you feel like that,” she said simply; “it is all so beautiful to me.”
“Just at present perhaps—but by and by—”
“I hope it will be, by and by also. Anyhow, I shall still have my mountains.”
“And after all they’re nothing in the world but indentations and corrosions on the crust of a planet, that is one in millions.”
There was a pause, then she asked slowly: “Is that how you look upon human beings?”