“Please mention one of them,” he glibly interrupted. “What did Emerson ever discover? Did he ever pen a single truth?”
“Aloft in secret veins of air
Blows the sweet breath of song,”
she replied. “He trod the very headlands of truth. But you are not serious——” she checked herself, recollecting that she was speaking to a stranger.
“Not serious but emphatically in earnest,” he went on, in the same genial tone with which he had begun. “There isn’t a thing but cunning phrase-form in anything the man ever wrote. He didn’t know how to represent life.”
“Oh, I see,” Miss Moyne ventured, “you are a realist.”
It is impossible to convey any adequate idea of the peculiar shade of contempt she conveyed through the words. She lifted her head a little higher and her beauty rose apace. It was as if she had stamped her little foot and exclaimed: “Of all things I detest realism—of all men, I hate realists.”
“But I kept the wine off your dress!” he urged, as though he had heard her thought. “There’s nothing good but what is real. Romance is lie-tissue. Reality is truth-tissue.”
“Permit me to thank you for your good intentions,” she said, with a flash of irony; “you held the napkin just in the right position, but the wine never fell from the table. Still your kindness lost nothing in quality because the danger was imaginary.”
When dinner was over, Miss Moyne sought out Hartley Crane, the Kentucky poet who knew everybody, and suggested that perhaps the stranger was Mr. Arthur Selby, the analytical novelist whose name was on everybody’s tongue.