"Yes. And betting, 'sport,' war, idleness, drink, vice, tobacco, tea, all the abominations of life. All the reversions to incompleted types. You ought to write a play or a novel on these things. I'm not speaking wildly. I'm speaking of a proved scientific possibility of relative human perfection. When life has been made glorious, as I can see that it could be made, then you artists could set to work to decorate it as much as you like."
"So, then," said Roger, "there are three ways to perfection, by admitting women to the suffrage, by driving men into the army, and by substituting the College of Surgeons for the Government. Now an artist is concerned above all things with moral ideas. He is not limited, or should not be, to particular truths. His world is the entire world, reduced, by strict and passionate thinking, to its imaginative essence. You and your schemes, and their relative importance, are my study, and, when I have reduced them to the ideas of progress which they embody, my material. I think that you have all made the search for perfection too much a question of profession. It is not a question of profession. It is a question of personal character." After a short pause he went on. "At the same time, there is nothing the man of thought desires so much as to be a man of action. English writers (I suppose from their way of bringing up) have been much tempted to action. Byron went liberating Greece. Chaucer was an ambassador, Spenser a sort of Irish R.M., Shakespeare an actor-manager and money-lender, or, as some think, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Writing alone is not enough for a man."
Leslie, who had been chatting to Ethel Fawcett, looked at Roger without speaking. Dinner came slowly to an end. The ladies left the room. The men settled into their chairs. Dr. Heseltine moved the port to Lionel, with, "I suppose you're not allowed this?"
Lionel refused the port, smiling. He put a white tabloid into a little soda-water and settled into the chair next to Roger. He pulled out his cigarette case. "Will you smoke?" he asked. "These are rather a queer kind."
"No, thanks," said Roger. "I've given it up."
"I don't think I could do that," said Lionel, selecting a strange-looking cigarette done up in yellow paper, with twisted ends. "I smoke a good deal. When one's alone one wants tobacco; one gets into the way of it."
He lit a cigarette with a brown hand which trembled. Roger, noticing the tremor, and the redness of the man's eyes, wondered if he were a secret drinker. "Are you much alone?" he asked.
"A good deal," Lionel answered. "I've just been reading a book by you; it's called The Handful. I think you wrote it, didn't you? So you've been in the tropics, too?"
"I went to stay with an uncle at Belize, five years ago," said Roger. "I only stayed for about a month."
"Belize," said Lionel. "My chief was in Belize. Was there any yellow fever there, when you were there?"