Real tragedy lay in something very different—perhaps in manhood awaking from ignoble lethargy to learn its own degeneracy in a young girl's scornful eyes.
All day long he sat in his office attending to the trivial business that came into it—not enough so far to give him a living.
In the still spring evenings he retired to his quarters in the back parlour, bathed, dressed, looking out at the cats on the back fences. Then he went forth to dine either at the Legation or with some one of the few friends he had cared to retain in that magic-lantern world which he at last had found uninhabitable—a world in which few virile men remain very long—fewer and fewer as the years pass on. For the gilding on the temple dome is peeling off; and the laughter is dying out, and the hum of the drones sounds drowsy like unreal voices heard in summer dreams.
"It is the passing of an imbecile society," declaimed Westguard—"the dying sounds of its meaningless noise—the first omens of a silence which foretells annihilation. Out of chaos will gradually emerge the elements of a real society—the splendid social and intellectual brotherhood of the future——"
"See my forthcoming novel," added Lacy, "$1.35 net, for sale at all booksellers or sent post-paid on receipt of——"
"You little fashionable fop!" growled Westguard—"there's a winter coming for all butterflies!"
"I've seen 'em dancing over the snow on a mild and sunny day," retorted Lacy. "Karl, my son, the nobly despairing writer with a grouch never yet convinced anybody."
"I don't despair," retorted Westguard. "This country is getting what it wants and what it deserves, ladled out to it in unappetising gobs. Year after year great incoming waves of ignorance sweep us from ocean to ocean; but I don't forget that those very waves also carry a constantly growing and enlightened class higher and higher toward permanent solidity.
"Every annual wave pushes the flotsam of the year before toward the solid land. The acquaintance with sordid things is the first real impulse toward education. Some day there will be no squalor in the land—neither the physical conditions in our slums nor the arid intellectual deserts within the social frontiers."
"But the waves will accomplish that—not your very worthy novels," said Lacy, impudently.