“But why not, my good sir?” answered the American. “Why shouldn’t Wone use all his energy to crush Romer, just as Romer uses all his energy to crush Wone?”
Lacrima sighed. “I don’t think either of you make this world seem a very nice place,” she observed.
“A nice place?” cried Mr. Quincunx. “It’s a place poisoned at the root—a place full of gall and wormwood!”
“In my humble opinion,” said the American, “it’s a splendid world. I love to see these little struggles and contests going on. I love to see the delicious inconsistencies and self-deceptions that we’re all guilty of. I play the game myself, and I love to see others play it. It’s the only thing I do love, except—” he added after a pause—“except my pictures.”
“I loathe the game,” retorted the recluse, “and I find it impossible to live with people who do not loathe it too.”
“Well—all I can say, my friend,” observed Dangelis, “is that this business of ‘renouncing,’ of which you talk, doesn’t appeal to me. It strikes me as a backing down and scurrying away, from the splendid adventure of being alive at all. What are you alive for,” he added, “if you are going to condemn the natural combative instinct of men and women as evil and horrible? They are the instincts by which we live. They are the motives that propel the whole universe.”
“Mr. Wone would say,” interposed Lacrima, “and I’m not sure that I don’t agree with him, that the real secret of the universe is deeper than all these unhappy struggles. I don’t like the unctuous way he puts these things, but he may be right all the same.”
“There’s no secret of the universe, Miss Traffio,” the American threw in. “There are many things we don’t understand. But no one principle,—not even the principle of love itself, can be allowed to monopolize the whole field. Life, I always feel, is better interpreted by Art than by anything else, and Art is equally interested in every kind of energy.”
Lacrima’s face clouded, and her hands fell wearily upon her lap.
“Some sorts of energy,” she observed, in a low voice, “are brutal and dreadful. If Art expresses that kind, I’m afraid I don’t care for Art.”