“About love. Some novelist does. To be conscious in any way toward it is to be fatally infected.”
“What novelist?” Advena asked, with shining interest.
“Some novelist. I—I can’t have invented it,” he replied, somewhat confounded. He got up and walked to the window, where it stood open upon the verandah. “I don’t write novels,” he said.
“Perhaps you live them,” suggested Advena. “I mean, of course,” she added, laughing, “the highest class of fiction.”
“Heaven forbid!”
“Why Heaven forbid? You are sensitive to life, and a great deal of it comes into your scope. You can’t see a thing truly without feeling it; you can’t feel it without living it. I don’t write novels either, but I experience—whole publishers’ lists.”
“That means,” he said, smiling, “that your vision is up to date. You see the things, the kind of things that you read of next day. The modern moral sophistications—?”
“Don’t make me out boastful,” she replied. “I often do.”
“Mine would be old-fashioned, I am afraid. Old stories of pain”—he looked out upon the lawn, white where the chestnut blossoms were dropping, and his eyes were just wistful enough to stir her adoration—“and of heroism that is quite dateless in the history of the human heart. At least one likes to hope so.”
“I somehow think,” she ventured timidly, “that yours would be classic.”