“Musk and cigarette smoke,” interposed Dicky, lightly. Then he saw that levity struck a false note.
“Pah!” the other jerked forth, impatiently. “Don’t talk like that! It is the most terrible, the most touching, the most inspiring thing I have seen in my life. I breathe in a new ambition here, out of this atmosphere. We were talking of the London poor. I thought they made the loudest appeal—but they are nothing beside this!” He spread his thin, nervous hand out as he spoke, and swept it in a comprehensive gesture over the spectacle before them. “These are my sisters—my unhappy and dishonored sisters, scorned and scornful—oh, yes, they are all my sisters!”
“But fortunately they don’t know it,” urged Dicky, surveying the ladies with pouting lips and half-closed eyes. “For God’s sake, don’t mention it to them.”
Christian turned round, with one knee on the sofa, and claimed his companion’s attention. “I wanted to be able to add you to my very little list of friends,” he said, gravely. “All the evening I have had that in my mind—and it may be something else, too. But if you cannot understand me, now, when I tell you how all this moves me—and if you only care to mock at what I say—why, then, it is not needful to say more.”
Dicky faced about in turn, and regarded him with a puzzled glance, from which he was at pains to exclude all signs of frivolity. “But you haven’t told me how it moves you at all,” he said, vaguely.
“Oh, how,” repeated Christian with hesitation. “It is not easy to say just how. But I am devoured by a great compassion. I could weep tears at the heart-misery I see here. They shout in the papers and wring their hands over the massacre of Armenians—but right here—this thing—is it not more cruel and dreadful still? Here there is no question of race hatreds and religious hatreds, but just the cold, implacable pressure of poverty on human souls, crushing them and sinking them in shame.”
“Oh, that’s only a part of the story—not such a deuce of a big part either,” urged the other, gently. “Don’t get so excited about it, my dear fellow. It is by no means a new thing. And wait till you know more about it, and have thought it over—and then, if you feel that there is anything you can do, why, take my word for it, it will still be here. It won’t disappear in the meanwhile. You’ll still be in time.”
Christian regarded him wistfully, and with a mild, faint smile. “You would never enter into my feelings about this,” he said, softly. “We are made differently. It strikes you as strange, does it not, that a young man, coming into contact with this for the first time, should be filled only with the yearning to help these poor girls, and do good to them? It surprises you? It is something new to you, n’est ce pas?”
Dicky grinned within decorous limits. “My dear boy,” he declared, confidentially, “so far from being new, it’s the oldest thing in the world. Every young fellow worth his salt that I have ever known, or that anybody’s ever known, has swelled himself out with precisely these same reform sentiments. In this very promenade here I have witnessed at least a dozen attacks like yours. And don’t think I am jeering at the thing. It is a very beautiful and generous spirit indeed, and I admire it awfully, I assure you—only—only, as one gets to know his way about a trifle better, he sees that there isn’t so much in it as he thought there was. And that’s what I was trying to say to you. Don’t let your first impulses run away with you. If the subject interests you, appeals to you, very well; get to understand it. You will find that it is more complicated, perhaps, than you think. But when you know it all, why, then you can do what you like.”
Some of the light seemed to have been turned out. A definitive blare rolled up from the orchestra below; the throng of promenaders, though still informed by the most leisurely of moods, was converging upon the door of exit. The two young men arose.