“Yes,” I assented. “And a pretty good sort, too. It does everything but think. That sounds rather hard; but that was what I was, three years ago.”
“I suppose it was the feeling of the game, the bigger game, that got you in it?”
“Frankly, yes; more or less. And that’s true of most of us. Not all, though. But once in, we got a touch of the other thing.”
“Don’t be too quick to judge when you get over there,” he said, divining my thoughts. “Public opinion is complex, but there is one thing that decides America in the end, always,—idealism. It’s a quality that is our weakness and our salvation. It makes us the prey to quacks and demagogues, until we learn to see through them. But it is the air we breathe and no one can lead us long away from it.”
“I say, Mr. Brinsmade,” I broke in, “don’t put me down for the sort of expatriate who goes round damning his country—”
“My dear David,” he said, laying his hand on my arm, “don’t worry. I feel even more strongly than you do. And it’s a big test that’s coming; make no mistake. It’s our kind that’s failing, not America. Somehow, the class that ought to lead, doesn’t.”
We separated on that, and I went down to arrange my cabin, a little uncomfortable at what I had said, and wondering if my listener had not been all the while smiling tolerantly at my youthful pessimism,—for though I am obstinate in my opinions, I do not express them easily in conversation.
When I returned the early twilight was sifting in. I went to the upper deck, with a vague feeling of uneasiness which to this day I cannot explain. Invisible nets descended between us and the fading world; the ship itself, its masts and its traveling rails, was dissolving in the flowing in of the dusk. I went directly to the rear, and twenty feet away I saw her as I had expected, a blot against the rail. She did not turn at my approach, though we were alone on the creaking deck. Twice I came to the railing at her side, hesitated and turned away. She was there, like a statue of bereavement, oblivious of all but the France that was now but the faint iterated flashing of distant lights.
I do not know how long I continued there, pacing off the deck under the swinging spaces of the night. All my instincts urged me to her side, and all my education warned me against the intrusion. I felt so keenly her utter loneliness, the mysterious sense of some overwhelming sorrow, the exhaustion of an unending struggle, that twice, with some hasty phrase on my lips, I stopped, determined to speak to her. But each time I turned away. Yet, each time, I remember the angry rebellion that came into my heart at the tyranny of convention which interposed between us. Had she been a woman of the people,—how easy it would have been! But she was not. She was of my own kind, and convention dictated that I should pass on and leave her there in the melancholy of the damp night, eating out her heart.