"Youthful enthusiasm," muttered the other man. "Delightful thing—youthful enthusiasm—to get over."
"Oh, no! I hope I never shall! What is life worth if one is not to show that one enjoys it? How can you look at a day like this—a splendid, champagnelike day—and yet—"
"My dear fellow," interrupted Stanley, with a queer smile, "when a man gets to my time of life there is always something melancholy to him in the picture of a spring day. It reminds him of his own youth: all tears and sunshine. Today there are neither tears or sunshine; it is all just contemplation. I don't seem to belong to the play at ail, any more, myself; I'm merely a spectator. To the spectator there is always something pathetic about joy."
"Your lunch was indigestable, that's all that is the matter with you," laughed Dick. "It's a dogma of mine that pessimism is merely another word for indigestion."
"Dogma!" sighed Stanley, "Don't you know that all dogmas are obsolete? Don't you know that in this rapid age we believe everything, accept everything and yet doubt everything?"
"Isn't that a trifle paradoxical?"
"No; only modern! We believe everything that inventors or scientists may tell us; but in the world spiritual we believe nothing. Is that a paradox?"
"But indigestion is surely, h'm, material rather than spiritual?" Dick enjoyed the verbal parries that he was always sure of with Stanley. He was always trying to get at the secret man's cynicism, a cynicism that was the essence of what many other men of the world he lived in seemed to feel, but were not all, perhaps, so well able to express.
"Oh well," was Stanley's answer, "after all, it doesn't matter. Nothing makes any difference." He looked blankly ahead as if all the world was contained in the space occupied between the cob's ears. Then he went on, in his minor monotone, "No, nothing, except—"
Dick, thinking to be cheery, put in "Except marriage?"