"No!" came from Stanley, with a sudden flick of the whip over the cob's flanks, "that only makes differences."
Dick laughed somewhat impatiently. "Oh!" he urged, "why sit there and be dismal? Why not wake up and live? Surely the air is full of it, of this fair Life? Enjoy it, brace up, be young!"
"Ah, if I only could again, if I only could! Oh, to be young again! He is the Autocrat of today, the young man." He lapsed into his sneer once more. "The young man of today thinks he has the experience of the centuries at his fingertips, whereas he really has only the gloves that were made yesterday and will split tomorrow."
"You are not only unjust," protested Dick, "you are flippant."
"Of course I am! The keynote of this end of the century is lightness. The modern declares that life is but a joke, and a bad one at best. How to live without ever allowing oneself to suspect that life is more than a game in which the odds are heads, Death wins; tails, Man loses: that is the great problem of the decade. The universal solution of the difficulty is the practice of superficiality. Skim! Be light! Never penetrate below the surfaces! Never search the deep! Make love as if it were a tourney of jests; die as if it were a riddle well guessed! Be scintillantly versatile, rather than thorough; hide your ignorance with bland blasédom; treat tragedy as an intruder, comedy as a chum, and as a reward you will be called 'up-to-date.' Nay, more: your fashionable friends may even mispronounce French in your behalf and dub you fin de siècle!"
Dick shuddered laughingly. "A horrible philosophy," he said. And yet he was glad of the other's bitterness; it showed, through all its veil of sneers and scorn, something of the point of view of the foremost in that race toward Death that some of the town-dwellers are wont to call Life.
Yet he could not keep his thoughts long on the serious import of the other's scornful flippancy. How shall two-and-twenty years, and health, and sunshine, and a spirit susceptible to enjoyments that the very atmosphere seemed redolent of, allow a young man to brood on the progress of the world's cancer? No; there were too many distractions! Tandems whirling by with horsy young men handling the ribbons; brakes full of laughing girls and straw-hatted young men; hackney carriages with four occupants unmistakably of the bookmaker guild.
Just before they rolled into sight of the grand-stand, Stanley said, "Oh, who do you suppose I had a letter from yesterday?"
"No idea."
"The most noble A.B. Wooton, of the late lamented 'Torch'."