"But what's the good of the extraordinary extension if there is no affirmation of it, if it all goes to the negative, as you say? Where are the fine consequences?" Dormer asked.
"In one's own spirit. One is one's self a fine consequence. That's the most important one we have to do with. I am a fine consequence," said Gabriel Nash.
Biddy rose from the bench at this and stepped away a little as to look at a piece of statuary. But she had not gone far before, pausing and turning, she bent her eyes on the speaker with a heightened colour, an air of desperation and the question, after a moment: "Are you then an æsthete?"
"Ah there's one of the formulas! That's walking in one's hat! I've no profession, my dear young lady. I've no état civil. These things are a part of the complicated ingenious machinery. As I say, I keep to the simplest way. I find that gives one enough to do. Merely to be is such a métier; to live such an art; to feel such a career!"
Bridget Dormer turned her back and examined her statue, and her brother said to his old friend: "And to write?"
"To write? Oh I shall never do it again!"
"You've done it almost well enough to be inconsistent. That book of yours is anything but negative; it's complicated and ingenious."
"My dear fellow, I'm extremely ashamed of that book," said Gabriel Nash.
"Ah call yourself a bloated Buddhist and have done with it!" his companion exclaimed.
"Have done with it? I haven't the least desire to have done with it. And why should one call one's self anything? One only deprives other people of their dearest occupation. Let me add that you don't begin to have an insight into the art of life till it ceases to be of the smallest consequence to you what you may be called. That's rudimentary."