"With your own sweet self to blame. I know the feeling. You've been thinking, or, rather, you think you have been thinking. And when one is in that state, everything goes against the grain. Even such a galaxy as that!" She waved her fan to the direction of the inner rooms, and a smile of mischief curled her mouth. "What do you think of this year's crop of lions?"
"Bah!" he scorned viciously, with all the bitterness of the man knocking at the closed portals. "Who was it that first gave your friend Clarence Miller the idea that he was a novelist? His wife, I suppose. When a man's single his follies are suggested by the devil; when he's married, by his wife. I suppose she wants her husband to equal the notoriety attained by her brother-in-law, the composer of 'Rip Van Winkle' and other comic operas that society flocks to listen to. It's a great pity that art and literature happen to be the thing this season."
"You're thinking of the real artists and writers, I presume. Well, it is rather hard on them."
"Hard? Why, its death! Think of the author that finds the market glutted with the free-gratis product of the society butterfly's pen. Its enough to create suicides."
"But you can't very well include Mr. Wreath in the free-gratis class?"
"No. But he is a charlatan, for revenue only. He has so many fads that they stud his conversation as barnacles cover a rock. He is a trumpeter of theories. Oh, I don't deny that he writes well! But he is not satisfied with that, unfortunately; he must needs preach, and the man who preaches about his art is a dispiriting spectacle."
"Dear, dear! What a change! It used to be that we others said all the cutting things, while you listened in awe and trembling; now it is you that uses the edge tools of language. You have beaten us at our own game." Mrs. Stewart dropped her voice a little, and sighed. "But you have lost as much as you have gained, have you not?"
He nodded silently. "The world is a usurer that lends us wisdom if we will but pay our youth as interest. And when we are bankrupt in youth, the wisdom turns to ashes."
"Don't be morbid. It's too fashionable. Cynicism is so cheap nowadays that the poorest Philistine of us all can afford it. The only virtue in optimism, it seems to me, is that it is suffering neglect today; for that reason I may espouse it, merely to avoid the charge of being commonplace. Come, be gay I Laugh! Forget!"
"To forget is to forego one of life's sweetest pains." He laughed mechanically, and got up, offering Mrs. Stewart his arm. "I'm a stupid, morbid fool. My only saving grace is that I know just how big a fool I am." They entered the inner rooms, and Mrs. Stewart, with a smile and a bow, left Dick to talk flatteringly to the musical lion of the town.