“I was thinking how different the American man is from the average Englishman, both in mind, temperament and physique.”
“We’re certainly beaten under the last head,” he replied, with a frank laugh. “I am always admiring your Englishmen from the point of view of good looks, though you know our men can be pretty fit, as we’ve shown in your sports’ contests. But we’re not such good lookers, sure. As for temperament”—he looked at her with a little challenge in his grey-blue eyes—“that isn’t racial, you know; it’s individual. I guess one of my countrymen may possess it as well as an Englishman. And what do you mean by a temperament, anyway?”
Claudia shook her head. She refused to be drawn. “Impossible to define. Those who have it do not need a definition, and those who have it not—will never find one. Didn’t someone once say: ‘Art is life seen through a temperament’?”
“But I’m not an artist,” he replied quickly, “only a merchant, who purveys works of art through the medium of a printing-press. Do you think that only professed artists may possess a temperament?”
“Of course not. That would be too ridiculous. I daresay some of the greatest artists are inarticulate.”
“I am glad to hear you say that, because I should have hated to have you put me right out of court. Because,” he spoke slowly, “lately I have begun to realize that a certain resurrection is going on within me; that what I tried deliberately to kill is still alive, painfully alive.”
She was aware that he was on the verge of a confidence, and she only looked her interest. She liked him, and she felt she wanted to know more about him; for never had they discussed their private lives with one another. He was introducing a new element into their friendship.
“I married before I was twenty-two, and last fall I became a widower. I married early after deliberation and sober reflection. Isn’t it curious that one can so often reflect more soberly when one is twenty than when one is approaching forty, as I am now? I married, my friends said, most suitably. I was not what you would call in love with her. I had known her for years, and I was fond of her in a quiet, unemotional way, which you people of temperament despise. I married young to have my mind and energies free for my work of restoring an old firm to its original activity and greatness. I realized that if youth wants to toe the straight line, it must keep clear of emotional complications. I saw other men taken off their work, their senses flaying them into madness and folly, by the women they met. I determined that I would marry and keep clear of attractive women. I would settle down early into a family man, and if there were joys that I knew not—well, the man who has been born blind doesn’t know the glory of the sunshine. My wife was placid and quite content with the small amount of leisure and attention I could give her. All my best energies I gave to my work. Every American is born ambitious; it’s in the very air he breathes, and with his first little squalling breath he draws it in. I had rather a tough fight, but I won out all right.... Now I am nearly forty I begin to wonder if I have done the best with my life; I begin to see that perhaps those other fellows who never got on are not to be pitied after all. I begin to feel a hiatus in my life; I begin to see what life might be.”
As he looked at the beautiful vivid woman among the cushions of the armchair, he recalled the quiet, orderly life he had led with the one who had borne his name, the lack of anything approaching exaltation or beauty in their relationship, the prosaic monotony of their days, and he wondered if he had not been the greatest of God’s fools. What would life be with such a woman as the one Who now sat plaiting her fingers in her lap, her very finger-tips pulsating with life? The magnetism of her womanhood reached him as he stood, and made his breath come more quickly. They had so much in common already, was it too wild and venturesome to hope that they might have more?
“In short,” she said slowly, “you have sacrificed the best years of your life to what you men call ‘the game.’ But you have succeeded. Many men sacrifice everything and—fail. You may feel at odd moments that you have missed something, but I expect you are really quite satisfied. You know the proverb about the cake?”