The Sentimentalist was amused.
“All that may be very true,” she said, “but it has nothing to do with poor old Mr. Durham. The idea of his marrying! Whatever put such a thing into your head?”
“Common sense and reason combined,” replied the Philosopher, blandly. “I do not want to touch upon a painful subject—but Mr. Durham is at the present time conscious of solitude,—loneliness—”
“Ah, yes!” sighed Sylvia. “He is very lonely.”
“Exactly! Now loneliness, though welcome and desirable to a man of intellectual ability, is not always so to persons whose intelligence appears limited to the sport of fishing. It is possible to grow weary of rod and line if nothing else presents itself on the mental horizon. Even the crazed creatures who play golf or tennis all day and every day do so in a certain radius of companionship. Mr. Durham appears to have no acquaintances except your father and yourself.”
Sylvia thought a moment.
“No,—he is rather mistrustful of society,” she said, at last. “I have often heard him say he would rather have no friends at all than pretended ones. He is very blunt—and he hates anybody or anything that seems insincere or hypocritical.”
Walter Craig, F.S.A., took to his favourite amusement of puffing round O’s in smoke from his mouth as he enjoyed his pipe.
“Well, then, very naturally he is left to himself,” he said, “because there are no human beings in the world who are sincere,—nobody can afford to be honest. To satisfy social convention you must be a hypocrite. Otherwise you get yourself disliked.”
She gave a little shrug of her shoulders.