She stopped and waited for him to speak. But he made no comment.
He was not insensible to the cleverness with which she assembled her points. There was about her address a climacteric quality that compelled his admiration. But her speech fell flat because he failed to pick up his cues. The obvious retort that she must have anticipated, was never spoken; so each pause was pregnant with the suggestion of finality, of failure.
“I felt as though I were being driven, blindfold, along a crooked passage,” she said, later, in describing the interview to Sullivan. “Each time I turned a corner, some one rose and struck me in the face, so that I reeled and lost my bearings and had to wait a bit in order to recover myself and my sense of direction.”
Dilling half suspected this. He did not, however, assume a difficult and disinterested manner, deliberately, nor did he act with conscious rudeness. He simply felt no curiosity in Mrs. Barrington nor in the object of her visit, and no obligation to pretend that he did.
“I have come to you,” she said, again, “because you are the embodiment of all the qualities I have mentioned. Your sympathy, I take for granted, for the reason that the cause I plead is a spiritual cause, Mr. Dilling. I am asking for the development of a nation’s soul.”
“Oh!”
This response, though almost imperceptible, affected the woman as applause breaking suddenly over an unfriendly house, stimulates an actor to greater achievement. She left her chair and stood before him, a vision of aggressive beauty. She nearly lost herself in the part she was playing, and allowed impulse rather than design to dominate the moment.
“We admit that in the fierce struggle for existence, a young country must concern itself primarily with material problems, and that the song of the spirit is often stifled by the cry of hungry children. But has not the day arrived for us when our thought, and at least a small part of our resources, should be devoted to providing nourishment for the Canadian soul? I know that this sounds like the spell-binder’s affluence of speech, but, believe me, Mr. Dilling, I have a practical proposition behind it.”
“Well?” said Dilling, without enthusiasm.
She pointed to the Little Theatre movement, to various literary and dramatic organisations that have sprung up throughout the Dominion, as a proof that we are seeking a means of artistic expression, for spiritual development, that we are feeling a reaction from the wave of materialism which, in these times, holds the land in thrall. “In a word,” she said, “we are looking for happiness, only just realising that we have striven without it all these years. We are not a happy nation, Mr. Dilling.”