Davenport's only reply was a short laugh.
“Suppose you had the money, and could live as you liked, where would you go?” demanded Larcher, slightly nettled.
“I would live a varied life. Probably it would have four phases, generally speaking, of unequal duration and no fixed order. For one phase, the chief scene would be a small secluded country-house in an old walled garden. There would be the home of my books, and the centre of my walks over moors and hills. From this, I would transport myself, when the mood came, to the intellectual society of some large city—that of London would be most to my choice. Mind you, I say the intellectual society; a far different thing from the Society that spells itself with a capital S.”
“Why not of New York? There's intellectual society here.”
“Yes; a trifle fussy and self-conscious, though. I should prefer a society more reposeful. From this, again, I would go to the life of the streets and byways of the city. And then, for the fourth phase, to the direct contemplation of art—music, architecture, sculpture, painting;—to haunting the great galleries, especially of Italy, studying and copying the old masters. I have no desire to originate. I should be satisfied, in the arts, rather to receive than to give; to be audience and spectator; to contemplate and admire.”
“Well, I hope you may have your wish yet,” was all that Larcher could say.
“I should like to have just one whack at life before I finish,” replied Davenport, gazing thoughtfully into the shadow beyond the lamplight. “Just one taste of comparative happiness.”
“Haven't you ever had even one?”
“I thought I had, for a brief season, but I was deceived.” (Larcher remembered the talk of an inconstant woman.) “No, I have never been anything like happy. My father was a cold man who chilled all around him. He died when I was a boy, and left my mother and me to poverty. My mother loved me well enough; she taught me music, encouraged my studies, and persuaded a distant relation to send me to the College of Medicine and Surgery; but her life was darkened by grief, and the darkness fell over me, too. When she died, my relation dropped me, and I undertook to make a living in New York. There was first the struggle for existence, then the sickening affair of that play; afterward, misfortune enough to fill a dozen biographies, the fatal reputation of ill luck, the brief dream of consolation in the love of woman, the awakening,—and the rest of it.”
He sighed wearily and turned, as if for relief from a bitter theme, to the book in his hand. He read aloud, from the sonnet out of which they had already been quoting: