“They mean that it's so very light—and yet so very subtle, Mr. Chilcote,” Mary Esseltyn explained.
“Indeed?” he said. “Then my imagination was at fault. I thought the piece was serious.”
“Serious!” Lillian smiled again. “Why, where's your sense of humor? The motive of the play debars all seriousness.”
Loder looked down at the programme still between his hands. “What is the motive?” he asked.
Lillian waved her fan once or twice, then closed it softly. “Love is the motive,” she said.
Now the balancing—the adjusting of impression and inspirations, of all processes in life, the most delicately fine. The simple sound of the word “love” coming at that precise juncture changed the whole current of Loder's thought. It fell like a seed; and like a seed in ultra-productive soil, it bore fruit with amazing rapidity.
The word itself was small and the manner in which it was spoken trivial, but Loder's mind was attracted and held by it. The last time it had met his ears his environment had been vastly different; and this echo of it in an uncongenial atmosphere stung him to resentment. The vision of Eve, the thought of Eve, became suddenly dominant.
“Love?” he repeated, coldly. “So love is the motive?”
“Yes.” This time it was Kaine who responded in his methodical, contented voice. “The motive of the play is love, as Lillian says. And when was love ever serious in a three-act comedy—on or off the stage?” He leaned forward in his seat, screwed in his eye-glass, and lazily scanned the stalls.
The orchestra was playing a Hungarian dance—its erratic harmonies and wild alternations of expression falling abruptly across the pinks and blues, the gilding and lights of the pretty, conventional theatre. Something in the suggestion of unfitness appealed to Loder. It was the force of the real as opposed to the ideal. With a new expression on his face, he turned again to Kaine.