"I am utterly unable," he repeated, "to conceive the state of mind of a person like you."
"Of course you are," said Anthony, with affability.
"I suppose," he thought, "it's because she is what they call a pronounced personality,—though that does n't seem a very flattering description. I suppose it's her odylic force."
Adrian selected a second egg, and placed it in his egg-cup.
"You live, you move, you have a sort of being," he said, as he operated upon the egg-shell; "and, apparently, you live contented. Yet, be apprised by me, you live in the manner of the beasts that perish. For the whole excuse, warrant, purpose, and business of life, you treat as alien to your equation."
"The business of life I entrust to my eminently competent man of business," said Anthony, with a bow.
"She 's so magnificently vivid," he thought. "That white skin of hers, and the red lips, and the white teeth; that cloud of black hair, and the sweep of it as it leaves her brow; and then those luminous, lucid, glowing, glowing eyes—that last smile of them, before she went away! She gives one such a sense of intense vitality, of withheld power, of unknown possibilities."
Adrian, with some expenditure of pains, extracted the spine from a grilled sardine.
"These children of the inconstant wave," he mused, "these captives from the inscrutable depths of ocean—the cook ought to bone them before she sends them to table, ought n't she? Labor et amor. The warrant for life is labour, and the business of life is love."
"You should address your complaints to the cook in person," said
Anthony.