"Rot!" cried the Colonel, literally snorting and bounding into the air. "You've no right to be free! Only savages and criminals want to be free! If that's all you have to say—" but his voice choked and he resumed his seat in silence.
"I've never heard anything quite so silly!" exclaimed Mrs. Forest who up to this point had maintained a discreet silence.
"It's true nevertheless," continued the Captain composedly, blowing a ring of blue smoke into the air. "Civilization, you know, is practically the same the world over. I have seen and heard everything, read everything, and met everybody that's worth meeting, and I'm tired of seeing and hearing them over and over again, year in and year out, with always the dead certainty of their return to look forward to. Our lives have become too stilted, too artificial—we lack poise, we live in grooves. Everything is overdone—there is nothing left for us to enjoy—our finer sensibilities have become dulled—the simplicity and refinements of life have been swallowed up by luxury, tawdry display and prudism."
"Bosh!" cried the Colonel.
"Everybody," the Captain went on, "knows exactly what his neighbor thinks and is going to say, and should anybody by any chance begin to think differently and seriously on life, society instantly brands that person as stupid, if not a little queer. We have lost our independence."
"Nonsense!" said Mrs. Forest.
"Granted for the sake of argument," broke in the Colonel, flipping the ash from off his cigar. "But what about art, science and literature, the real things which stand for civilization?"
"Oh! as to them, they are all right in themselves. It is fortunate that man has an outlet through these manifold channels of expression.
"They are the best part of our lives so far as they go, but all art and science and no nature, and what becomes of man? Have they made the world happy, and is there any immediate prospect of their ever doing so? Did the Greeks, who attained the supreme heights in art, find happiness in their art? Their history is the record of one long struggle; and so it was with the renaissance of the Middle Ages, and so it is with us; our sciences and arts can never change the complicated conditions in which we live. They have never developed the sympathy and brotherly love which should exist between man and man; we are still barbarians.
"The most miserable wretches that ever lived were the very ones that passed their lives creating and theorizing. They all forgot and are still forgetting like the rest of the world to-day that, these things, no matter how great, amuse and interest for a time only; that once they are absorbed, their original charm and novelty are gone forever. They become worn and threadbare like all of man's inventions, and humanity is ever left searching for the great panacea of life.