"Oh, Destournelle!" Richard exclaimed.
"You have read him?"
"Every one has read him."
"And what do you think of him?"
"That his technique is as amazingly clever as his thought is amazingly rotten."
"I know—I know," she said eagerly. "And that is just what induced me to do all I could for him. If one could cut the canker away, give him backbone and decency, while retaining that wonderful technique, one would have a second and a greater Théophile Gautier."
Richard was looking full at her. His face had more colour, more animation, than usual.
"If—yes—if," he returned. "But that same if bulks mighty big to my mind."
"I know," she repeated. "Yet it seemed to me worth the attempt. And then, you understand,—who better?—that if one's own affairs are not conspicuously happy, one has all the more longing the affairs of others should be crowned with success. And this winter specially, among the sordid miseries, disgraces, deprivations, of the siege, one was liable to take refuge in an over-exalted altruism. It was difficult in so mad a world not to indulge in personal eccentricity—to the neglect of due worship of the great goddess Conventionality. With death in visible form at every street corner, one's sense of humour, let alone one's higher faculties, rebelled against the futility of such worship. So many detestable sights and sounds were perpetually presented to one—not to mention broth of abominable things daily for dinner—that one turned, with thanksgiving, to beautiful form in art, to perfectly felicitous words and phrases. The meaning of them mattered but little just then. They freed one from the tyranny of more or less disgusting fact. They satisfied eye and ear. One asked nothing more just then—luckily, you will say, since the animal Destournelle has very surely nothing more to give."
In speaking, Helen pushed her chair back, turning it sideways to the table. Her speech was alive with varied and telling inflections. Her smallest gesture had in it something descriptive and eloquent.