“Indeed?” I had said. “In what way is it particularly—pardon me—up to date?”
“Oh,” she replied, “it’s so real, Rollo.” Then, reassuringly, “They don’t talk about the soul, you know—you needn’t be afraid of that. It’s—it’s instinct. The soul is quite too old, you know.”
“A full season behind,” I assented gravely. “And so the soul, chez Mrs. Vicars, is superseded in favour of the dilettante animal? Is that so, my sister?”
“Yes,” she agreed doubtfully, and added, “Of course there are outsiders.”
It turned out, as Caroline had said, to be Instinct, Primal Sanity, and the Elemental Paganism, and very prettily put I heard it. No one was blasé. They said so. They were enthusiastic. My young man declared it with an animation that brought him near to spilling the liqueur carefully poised on his knee. He spoke of the keen joy of living, delicately and epigrammatically, digressing to observe that he preferred Indian cigarettes to Brazilian, and adding that after all there was nothing like the great rough kindnesses of the Mother Earth. Cicely Vicars’s gathering was indisputably in the vanguard of the latest cry.
Mr. Eleanor Macquoid seemed to take to me, for he spoke almost immediately of “people who understand.” I was evidently admitted on sight to the mystery, and improved the occasion accordingly. I examined my finger nails—I had seen him do so—and dropped my pearls of wisdom nonchalantly, as not expecting they would be gathered up.
He was talking softly, and almost sleepily, on the picturesqueness of Mass and Brute Bulk.
“There is something quite Titanic,” he said, “in the conception of a world where nothing was as yet ruled and squared out for us; where everything was vague and shifting.”
“It is an especially gigantic thought,” I replied appreciatively. “The insistence nowadays of the Social Nexus——”
I paused, and he nodded comprehendingly at the cue.