"Radwalader," he added, "many's the time I've listened to you. Now it's your turn to listen to me."
Radwalader, following the impulse of a momentary whim, folded his arms in turn.
"Mon cher confrère," he said amusedly, "I shall listen with reverent attention to whatever you may have to say."
"I know too well," continued the other, "that I can't appeal with any hope of success to your sense of pity—because you haven't any. Wilfully or otherwise, you have contrived to stifle the promptings of feeling which weaken—or is it strengthen?—other men. You're trained to perfection. But there must be one thing which even you are unable to forget—I mean the time when we were young and clean, when we smiled by day as we dreamed of what lay before us, instead of shuddering by night, as now, as we dream of what lies behind."
Radwalader nodded. "I'm not addicted, myself, to the unpleasant habit of shuddering," he said, "but I think I know what you mean by the other part of your preamble. 'When all the world was young, lad, and all the trees were green: and every goose a swan, lad, and every lass a queen!' Isn't that it? Yes, I seem to remember something of the sort, and with a not unpleasurable emotion. Continue, my good Jules."
"Sometimes," said Vicot, moistening his lips, "the thought of that time must come back even to you. Sometimes even you, with all your callousness, must contrast what you might have been with what you are. Sometimes a face, among all those we meet, must recall to you the days when better things were possible. But if you have never been thrust back thus upon your own youth, and grown sick at thought of it, I have! There's nothing more awful."
"We've been over all this before," put in Radwalader, with a suggestion of weariness.
"You said you'd hear me out! I'm not talking religion, or even morality. I'm trying to spare you the cant to which you once objected. I don't care about the future. I'm like you in having no more dread of hell than love of heaven. No, it's not the future which hits me. But the past—! The world—the world which, long since, I ran to meet so eagerly—has made me rotten, rotten, rotten to the core!"