"Oh, I didn't care to—I didn't want to interrupt."
"Anna expected you back to tea."
"I guess not."
Bragdon gave her a swift glance, but said nothing. This was a new aspect of his wife, and it evidently puzzled him. He was too much absorbed by his picture, however, to give much heed to anything.
Latterly another American had joined the circle around the dinner table on the terrace,—a long, lanky young man who had been in the navy during the late war and was now engaged in the production of literature. That is, he contributed profusely to those American magazines with flaming covers stories of love and adventure in strange seas,—the highly seasoned bonbon entertainment for the young. He was southern by birth with a pronounced manner towards women. And Milly found him attractive. Roberts and the fat Hawaiian wit had many encounters that kept the table stirred. To-night they were discussing the needs of the artist nature,—and "temperament." That was a term not much in vogue in the Chicago of Milly's time, but it seemed to occupy endlessly the talkers about the table at the Hotel du Passage. Milly never understood exactly what was meant by "having a temperament," or the "needs of the artistic temperament" except vaguely that it was a license to do flighty things that all reasonable Chicago folk would deplore.
To-night the Hawaiian was maintaining his favorite thesis,—that the first duty of the artist was to himself, to preserve and make effective his "temperament." Modern life, especially in America, he held, made bourgeois of us all. The inevitable ruin of the artist was to attempt to live according to the bourgeois ideal of morality. (That was another term which puzzled Milly always,—bourgeois. These young artists used it with infinite contempt, and yet she concluded shrewdly that the people she had known best and respected all her life would have to come under this anathema. To be healthy and normal, to pay one's bills and be true to husband or wife, was to be just bourgeois. According to that standard Jack was bourgeois, she supposed, and she was glad of it, and yet a little afraid at the same time, because it seemed to mark him out for artistic ineptitude.) But the fat man was talking heatedly, and Milly was listening.
"In our society artists have no chance to experiment in life, to perfect their natures untrammelled by public opinion, as the artists of old did." (And he cited a lot of names, beginning, of course, with Benvenuto and including Goethe, but Milly was not interested in these historical cases. It was the immediate application of the principle she was waiting for.)
"In those days," some one said, "artists were content to live in their own class like actors and had no social ambitions."
"And much better for them, too!" the Honolulu man put in.