The American gave her a quick, puzzled glance. There was a sorrowful intensity about her tone which he found difficult to understand.
“What I meant was,” he said, “that logically we can only do one of two things,—either join in the game and fight fiercely and craftily for our own hand, or take a convenient drop of poison and end the whole affair.”
The melancholy eyes of Mr. Quincunx opened very wide at this, and a fluttering smile twitched the corners of his mouth.
“We poor dogs,” he said, “who are not wanted in this world, and don’t believe in any other, are just the people who are most unwilling to finish ourselves off in the way you suggest. We can’t help a sort of sneaking hope, that somehow or another, through no effort of our own, things will become better for us. The same cowardice that makes us draw back from life, makes us draw back from the thought of death. Can’t you understand that,—you American citizen?”
Dangelis looked from one to another of his companions. He could not help thinking in his heart of the gay animated crowds, who, at that very moment, in the streets of Toledo, Ohio, were pouring along the side-walks and flooding the picture shows. These quaint Europeans, for all their historic surroundings, were certainly lacking in the joy of life.
“I can’t conceive,” remarked Mr. Quincunx suddenly, and with that amazing candour which distinguished him, “how a person as artistic and sensitive as you are, can stay with those people over there. Anyone can see that you’re as different from them as light from darkness.”
“My dear sir,” replied the American, interrupting a feeble little protest which Lacrima was beginning to make at the indiscretion of her friend, “I may or may not understand your wonder. The point is, that my whole principle of life is to deal boldly and freely with every kind of person. Can’t you see that I like to look on at the spectacle of Mr. Romer’s energy and prosperity, just as I like to look on at the revolt against these things in the mind of our friend Wone. I tell you it tickles my fancy to touch this human pantomime on every possible side. The more unjust Romer is towards Wone, the more I am amused. And the more unjust Wone is towards Romer, the more I am amused. It is out of the clash of these opposite injustices that nature,—how shall I put it?—that nature expands and grows.”
Mr. Quincunx gazed at the utterer of these antinomian sentiments, with humorous interest. Dangelis gathered, from the twitching of his heavy moustache, that he was chuckling like a goblin. The queer fellow had a way of emerging out of his melancholy, at certain moments, like a badger out of his hole; and at such times he would bring the most ideal or speculative conversation down with a jerk to the very bed-rock of reality.
“What’s amusing you so?” enquired the citizen of Ohio.
“I was only thinking,” chuckled Mr. Quincunx, stroking his beard, and glancing sardonically at Lacrima, “that the real reason of your enjoying yourself at Nevilton House, is quite a different one from any you have mentioned.”