She put her next thought out in its stark simplicity.
“Are we doing any real thing in the world at all?”
He did not answer for some seconds.
Then he astonished her by losing his temper. It was exactly as if her question had probed down to some secret soreness deep within him. “Oh, damn!” he shouted. “And on this lovely morning! It’s too bad of you, Dolly!” It was as if he had bit upon a tender tooth. Perhaps a fragment of the stopping had come out of his Nonconformist conscience.
He knelt up and stared at her. “You don’t love this, anyhow—whether you love me or not.”
He tried to alter his tone from a note of sheer quarrelsomeness to badinage. “You Blue Conscience, you! You Gnawing Question! Are we doing anything real at all, you say. Is no one, then, to stand up and meet the sunlight for its own sake, when God sends it to us? No! You can’t unsay it now.” (Though she was not unsaying it. She was only trying for some more acceptable way of saying it over again.) “My day is spoilt! You’ve stuck a fever into me!”
He looked about him. He wanted some vivid gesture. “Oh, come on!” he cried.
He sprang up. He gesticulated over her. He banished the view with a sweep of rejection. “Let us go back to the inn. Let us take our traps back to stuffy old Florence. Let us see three churches and two picture-galleries before sunset! And take our tickets for home. We aren’t rushing and we ought to rush. Life is rush. This holiday has lasted too long, Dolly.”
“‘Life is real! Life is earnest!’
Simple joys are not its goal.”