“I am only human,” he returned.
Suddenly he felt an overpowering urge to talk, an imperious need for candour. He wanted to open his heart, deplore his failures and the unfulfilment of his desires. He saw his inability to draw men to him, and surround them with a vivid atmosphere of comradeship in political endeavour and a common patriotic inspiration. He felt that men did not like him, that he would never be an adornment to their clubs, one upon whom the success of a social event depended. And, unaccountably, he realised that he cared—cared for himself, and for Marjorie, and for Azalea Deane. As though reading his thoughts, Hebe went on,
“You’ll never do it as you are, Raymond. You are suffering the result of the habit contracted, I have learned, in your college days, when you withdrew yourself from all but the few who recognised your talents and thrust themselves upon you for your worldly, and other-worldly behoof. A native shyness of strangers and an inherited reluctance to spend money on the amenities of life, moved you to live in cloistered exclusiveness, when you should have been expanding your soul in joyous contact with your fellow men. Am I not right?”
“I don’t think it was so bad as that,” said Dilling, fighting against the stupefying effect of the perfume he had learned to associate with her.
“But it was! You avoided human contact, and only by such means is life rid of its tendency to become set and small. Don’t you remember the French axiom, ‘L’esprit de l’homme n’est malleable que dans sa jeunesse’? You are still young, Raymond, but it is high time that you began remoulding. If you had only allowed yourself the Paganism of Youth, you would have spared yourself the Philistinism of Maturity.”
“It’s all very well to preach conviviality and bon camaraderie,” Dilling returned, stung into making what he afterwards felt to be an undignified defence, “but you must remember that I couldn’t afford to hold my own with the roisterers at college.” He moved, with a gesture of impatience, beyond the reach of her marauding fingers. “It was not so much inherited caution as immediate limitations that made my ‘exclusive cloistering’ necessary. I put myself through college, you know,” he added, with a touch of unconscious pride, “and I couldn’t afford to enjoy it.”
“But that’s the very point—the very point I’m driving at,” she triumphed. “If only you had spent beyond your means—if only once you had overstepped your limitations! We all do, all of us who have souls. One way or another, the artist is always spending. The lover never counts the cost. You can’t—you shouldn’t want to—reduce emotions to blue prints and specifications, and that’s what you have done! Listen, Raymond, and forgive me if I offend you. There is a corner of your personality that lies fallow because its dull atmosphere refuses nourishment to artistic taste and sensuous beauty. In other words, you are afraid to spend, even now, lest the ultimate cost may prove to be something you think you can’t afford. You are afraid to let yourself go, for emotions lead one even farther than the tangible medium of exchange.” Her tone changed. “How you ever came to marry a pretty woman is something of a mystery to me—a frump would have answered just as well. Indeed, I ask myself, why did you ever marry at all. Will you tell me?”
“I don’t think there’s any mystery about it,” parried Dilling.
He was not prepared to confess that love had played a very small part in his relations with Marjorie, nor that his need of her was more that of an amiable associate than wife. With the simplicity that marked so many of his social adventurings, he believed that when he could support a wife and family he should marry; and he chose the least objectionable—and most desirable externally—woman of his acquaintanceship. There was the explanation in a nutshell.
“Have you ever felt the appeal of sensuous beauty?” Hebe Barrington persisted. “No! I am answered. The very phrase revolts you as I speak it. It is an evocation of the Seventh Commandment and a ruined household. Queer fellow! Your insensibility to beauty in line and colour, not only in Art but in life, proclaims you a Philistine.”