Martin came in, on the laugh that followed.
"This sounds like a happy party," he remarked, as he greeted them.
"Bobs has an order, and she is exuberant," explained Jerry.
He proceeded to offer her various ridiculous suggestions as to fitting subjects for the fountain. They all went into dinner, laughing. But Jane's observing eye marked signs of weariness and feeling in Martin's face. He was his usual, spontaneous, interested self to the casual onlooker, but in moments when the others were talking, she caught him off guard, mask down.
Bobs and Jerry fell into a discussion over a line which Bobs quoted from Jane's book.
"But I don't agree with Jane's hypothesis, that every life is an end in itself, because it cannot be lived again: that the personal reaction to life, expressed in art, is of value, because it is individual."
"What is the individual's value, then?" Bobs demanded. "Yours, for instance?"
"I'm part of a whole. I'm an eye or an ear in the big organism. My job is no more important than—nor as important as—the function of the leg, or the arm."
"Then you think it is just accident that you happen to be the eye?" Martin inquired.
"Yes."