“And yet I know I am right.”
“I know you are right. I’m certain. Go on.
“If one of those ten thousand members of the Sokol Society had thrown back his brown cloak and shown red when all the others still kept them selves cloaked—if he was a normal sensitive man—he might have felt something of a fool. He might have felt premature and presumptuous. Red he was and the others he knew were red also, but why show it? That is the peculiar distress of people like ourselves, who have some sense of history and some sense of a larger life within us than our merely personal life. We don’t want to go on with the old story merely. We want to live somehow in that larger life and to live for its greater ends and lose something unbearable of ourselves, and in wanting to do that we are only wanting to do what nearly everybody perhaps is ripe to do and will presently want to do. When the New Age Martineau talks about begins to come it may come very quickly—as the red came at Prague. But for the present everyone hesitates about throwing back the cloak.”
“Until the cloak becomes unbearable,” she said, repeating his word.
“I came upon this holiday in the queerest state. I thought I was ill. I thought I was overworked. But the real trouble was a loneliness that robbed me of all driving force. Nobody seemed thinking and feeling with me.... I have never realized until now what a gregarious beast man is. It needed only a day or so with Martineau, in the atmosphere of ideas and beliefs like my own, to begin my restoration. Now as I talk to you—That is why I have clutched at your company. Because here you are, coming from thousands of miles away, and you talk my ideas, you fall into my ways of thought as though we had gone to the same school.”
“Perhaps we HAVE gone to the same school,” she said.
“You mean?”
“Disappointment. Disillusionment. Having to find something better in life than the first things it promised us.”
“But you—? Disappointed? I thought that in America people might be educating already on different lines—”
“Even in America,” Miss Grammont said, “crops only grow on the ploughed land.”