"Perhaps I can, Nan... out what I mean is it's our fault, not the fault of the century."
"What's our fault, Wenny?" asked Fanshaw smiling indulgently.
"That we are so damn rotten."
"But we're not. What we've lost in color and picturesqueness, we've made up in ..."
"In sheepishness and cowardice, I'll grant you that."
"Now Wenny."
Wenny saw himself in bitter distortion, standing on a hydrant confessing idiocies to crowds who wore his face as a mask on their own and bleated like sheep, baa, baa, at every pause. It all dissolved into an obscene muddle of leering faces. If I could only stop thinking.
They were cutting diagonally across the Common, under a hurrying sky lit by a last mustard-green flare from the west. The electric signs along Tremont Street bit icily through the lacy pattern of the stirring twigs of trees. The wind was getting steadier and colder, occasionally shot with a fine lash of snow.
"No, but we couldn't live without the ideal that somewhere at some time people had found life a sweeter, stronger draught than we find it," Fanshaw was saying. "That the flatness of our lives hasn't been the rule ... I don't think the fault's with us at all, Wenny. I think we're great people ... It's just this fearful environment we have to live down, the narrowness of our families, our bringing up, the moral code and all that. The people of the Renaissance were great because they lived in a great period...."
"Well, we haven't had much chance yet; give us time, Wenny," said Nan.