Anthony grasped only the larger implications of this speech, its opposition to that love which he had felt as a misty sort of glory, as intangible as the farthest star, as fragrant as a rose in the fingers. There was an undeniable weight of solid sense in what Annot had said. She knew a great deal more than himself, more—yes—than Eliza, more than anybody he had before known; and, in the face of her overwhelmingly calm and superior knowledge, his vision of love as eternal, changeless, his ecstatic dreams of Eliza with the dim, magic white lilacs in her arms, grew uncertain, pale. Love, viewed with Annot's clear eyes, was a commonplace occurrence, and marriage the merest, material convenience: there was nothing sacred about it, or in anything—death, birth, or herself.
And was not the biologist, with his rows of labelled plants and bones, his courageous questioning of the universe, of God Himself, bigger than the majority of men with their thin covering of cant, the hypocrisy in which they cloaked their doubts, their crooked politics and business? Rufus Hardinge's conception of things, Annot's reasoning and patent honesty, seemed more probable, more convincing, than the accepted romantic, often insincere, view of living, than the organ-roll and stained glass attitude.
In his new rationalism he eyed the world with gloomy prescience; he had within him the somber sense of slain illusions; all this, he felt, was proper to increasing years and experience; yet, between them, they emptied the notable bag of licorice.
Annot rested a firm palm upon his shoulder and sprang to the ground, and they walked directly and silently back. “It's a mistake to discuss things,” Annot discovered to him from the door of her room, “they should be lived; thus Zarathustrina.”
XLV
LATER they were driven from the porch by a heavy and sudden shower, a dark flood torn in white streamers and pennants by wind gusts, and entered through a long window a formal chamber seldom occupied. A thick, white carpet bore a scattered design in pink and china blue; oil paintings of the Dutch school, as smooth as ice, hung in massive gold frames; a Louis XVI clock, intricately carved and gilded, rested upon a stand enamelled in black and vermilion, inlaid with pagodas and fantastic mandarins in ebony and mother-of-pearl and camphor wood. At intervals petulant and sweet chimes rang from the clock: trailing, silvery bubbles of sound that burst in plaintive ripples.
Rufus Hardinge sat with bowed head, his lips moving noiselessly. Annot occupied a chair with sweeping, yellow lines, that somehow suggested to Anthony a swan. “Father has had a tiresome letter from Doctor Grundlowe at Bonn,” she informed the younger man.
“He disagrees with me absolutely,” Hardinge declared. “But Caprera at Padova disagrees with him; and Markley, at Glasgow, contravenes us all.”