CHAPTER XIX
THE LIAR
The lamps had not yet been lighted in the big, comfortable living-room and late sunlight striped wall and ceiling with rose where Karen sat sewing, and Darrel, curled up in a vast armchair, frowned over a book. And well he might, for it was a treatise on German art.
His patience arriving at the vanishing point he started to hurl the book from him, then remembering that it was not his to hurl, slapped it shut.
Which caused Karen to lift her deep violet eyes inquiringly.
"Teutonic Kultur! I've got its number," he said. Which observation conveyed no meaning to Karen.
"German art," he explained. "It used to be merely ample, adipose, and indigestible. Now the moderns have made it sinister and unclean. The ham-fist has become the mailed fist; the fat and trickling source of Teutonic inspiration has become polluted. There is no decadence more hideous than the brain cancer of a Hercules."
Karen followed him with intelligent interest. She said with hesitation: "The moderns, I think, are wandering outside immutable boundaries. Frontiers are eternal. If any mind believes the inclosed territory exhausted, there is nothing further to be found outside in the waste places—only chaos. And the mind must shift to another and totally different pasture—which also has its boundaries eternal and fixed."