“But I don’t like to think——Aren’t Great Men after all—great?”
“In their ways, in their places—Yes. But not if you go up to them and look at them. Not at the dinner table, not in their beds.... What a time of disillusionment you must have had!
“You see, Lady Harman,” he said, leaning back from his empty plate, inclining himself confidentially to her ear and speaking in a privy tone; “it’s in the very nature of things that we—if I may put myself into the list—we ideologists, should be rather exceptionally loose and untrustworthy and disappointing men. Rotters—to speak plain contemporary English. If you come to think of it, it has to be so.”
“But——” she protested.
He met her eye firmly. “It has to be.”
“Why?”
“The very qualities that make literature entertaining, vigorous, inspiring, revealing, wonderful, beautiful and—all that sort of thing, make its producers—if you will forgive the word again—rotters.”
She smiled and lifted her eyebrows protestingly.
“Sensitive nervous tissue,” he said with a finger up to emphasize his words. “Quick responsiveness to stimulus, a vivid, almost uncontrollable, expressiveness; that’s what you want in your literary man.”
“Yes,” said Lady Harman following cautiously. “Yes, I suppose it is.”