Both men laughed, and one of them listened to her thoughtfully as she moved about, while the other watched her, his dark eyes full of a keen appreciation of her grace and her concise, accurate movements.
"How good it is to have her here," thought Philip. Aloud, he said, seriously: "I do not think the world gains enough from Hamlet to make it worth the price he paid."
"Why not?" Lawrence was quick to respond. "Whatever his agony, whatever his failures and his death, he left the world a picture of man's heroic struggles to solve the riddle of the universe, his wisdom, his strength—and his weakness."
"But that is just what we don't want—the picture of man's weakness. It is made all the worse when it is presented with the power of a sublime work."
Claire turned from the stove, and looked at Philip. His eyes were burning with a deep, earnest fire that held her fascinated. She thought him the most beautiful of all the men she knew. It was not his face, not his appearance generally, but his eyes. Oh, the loss of such eyes! she thought—yes, they are what makes him a finer man than Lawrence. Why hasn't Lawrence such eyes?
"Believe me, friend," Philip was speaking again, "if I could erase from my knowledge the weakness of man, I would not need to trail my feet through these snow-buried forests to find an hour's rest from life."
Claire saw his fingers move nervously on the arms of his chair, and thought: "That is it, then; I was right; he has his tragedy." She looked at him again, and as she met his eyes she felt that she was sorrier for him than she had ever been for Lawrence. Yes, she was sorrier for this man whose soul burned out of his eyes than for that other whose soul was always curtained by the expressionless mask that hid him.
"I can't quite agree with you," Lawrence was saying; "I, too, know the weakness of man, but there is, nevertheless, the glory of sublime beauty which alone stands, immortal. I should indeed mourn for man if he were unable to be truly immortal even in his created work. That, it seems to me, saves him."
"Or loses him," Philip added. "One golden life of unbroken sunshine, dead at last and laid away in the memory of friends is worth more than your greatest poem."
"I should call that sentimentality," Lawrence laughed.