And still, he, the authority, knew that having a high ideal was not enough.
As the two moderns left the hotel, he said in a grave manner: "Let me take you home."
"No, don't think of it! I'm only going to the car-line," said Mary; and added absently: "I've been trying all week to go to see Angela, and now I must."
"Ah, yes!—certainly!" said the luncheon host hastily, and a look that could only be described as guilty flitted visibly over his face.
But this disappeared; the somewhat chastened authoritative look returned at once. Pursuing his tutorial round, Charles seemed able to think of nothing else but Mary's ill-starred friend, who had so damaged Mary, who had so staked and smashed her own life, on a sentence in a book.
And who put that sentence into a book, and who was going to wipe it out with another, if not he, Charles? Here, it might be, he had a pointer or two to give to that great compeer of his, the lady in Sweden.
He had done Miss Trevenna a serious wrong, of course; he had judged her by the company she kept. It was an age when cheeky "prophets" were shouting from every bush a New philosophy which amounted to this: that civilized society must be made accommodating to self-indulgent people. They did not mention, very probably they did not know, that it had not been easy to civilize society, and that self-indulgent people had not done the job. With such shallow egoists he had classed Miss Trevenna; and now, silent still, she had finely refuted him. There was, indeed, a quality not for little folk in this girl's fierce imprudences. At the test, she had repudiated the Ego, kicked off all the meanness and flabbiness of her teachings. But in the meantime, unfortunately, these teachings had done for her.
And it seemed to Charles Garrott, tramping intently along (for the downpour gave him the freedom of the streets to-day) that it would be a sweet and glorious thing if, say, a dozen of these leathern-lunged professors of a new chaos could be gathered up, from the studies and libraries where they sat so snug around the world, and brought here to share this girl's catastrophe and go with her in her exile. And by George!—they shouldn't squirm out by trying to blame it all on a mere ignorant Public Opinion either! No, he, Charles, having a lot of them together thus, would improve the occasion to explain, once and for all, that freedom was not a thing that any chance passer could pick up and use, like a cane; but, rather, the last difficult conquest of a unified race. He would inform them that it was only too fatally easy to act "free," at others' expense, the difficult and important thing being, precisely, not so to act. And as to love, he would hammer into their thick heads that the way to freedom was NOT through the delightfully easy course of "demonstrating experiment" by self-elected Exceptional People, but by the far more difficult demonstration that men and women could be strong and constant in their affections, and trustworthy in their passions.
There, indeed, was a demonstration for Exceptional People to get to work on at once. Why write large books to declare that "the great love" was its own justification. Why waste good ink upon an ideal truism? On what day would a New book-writer teach men and women how to love greatly, or how to tell even a little love from love's baser counterfeit? So long as every schoolboy, drawn by a brief spark, will swear that his is the great love; so long as men greatly love one person this year, and next year quite another; so long as they will gladly deceive themselves, or ape emotions above them, lest they must deny themselves a passing indulgence: thus long would untrustworthy mortals need the hard restraint of Law.
"Why, if men and women had the quality of love needed to make 'freedom' work," thought the tutor suddenly, sloshing along toward the Choristers', "they wouldn't need the freedom! No, then they'd be perfectly satisfied with monogamous marriage."