“What insight has your Matthew Strang?”
“He is as much yours as mine.”
“Don’t shuffle out of the question.”
“His insight expresses itself through his work. He doesn’t talk.”
“Is that a hit at his cousin?” queried Olive, savagely. “If so, it falls remarkably flat, considering Herbert Strang paints as well as talks.”
“Olive, why will you put words into my mouth? You know how much I admire Herbert Strang.”
“Ah, then you have more insight than I gave you credit for. You may even understand that a cynic is only a disappointed idealist, a saint plus insight. His soul is a palace of truth; society and its shams come to the test, yield up their implicit falseness, and are scornfully rejected. The stroke of wit is made with the sword of judgment. Its shaft is the lightning of righteous indignation.”
Mrs. Wyndwood felt this might pass well enough for an analysis of Olive’s own cynicism, but she had her doubts as to its applicability to Herbert’s.
Olive puzzled her frequently, and shocked her not seldom, but she felt instinctively that hers were the aberrations of a noble nature, while the cynicisms of Herbert jarred upon her without such reassurance of sweet bells jangled. Not that she doubted but that he, too, was much more idealistic than he made himself out—did he not write charming comedy love-scenes? Still he was a man who had seen the world, not a crude girl like Olive, and in the face of Olive’s affectionate analysis of Herbert—which she rightly divined owed less to reason than to the growing love for him which she had long suspected in her turbulent friend—Eleanor felt vaguely that while jarring notes may be struck from the soundest keyboard, they may also be the index of an instrument hopelessly out of tune. Of course Herbert was not that, she was sure; he lacked Matthew’s idealism and manly beauty, but he was handsome, too, in his daintier way, and charming and gifted, and probably the very husband to put an end to Olive’s psychical growing-pains. All this mixture of acute and feeble insight occupied Eleanor’s consciousness.
But all she said was, “Is that Emerson?”