“Why, how—”
“Oh, I could see it. We all get lonely, don’t we? I do, of course. Just now I’m getting sorer and sorer on Interesting People. I think I’ll go back to Paris. There even the Interesting People are—why, they’re interesting. Savvy—you see I am an American—savvy?”
“Why—uh—uh—uh—I d-don’t exactly get what you mean. How do you mean about ‘Interesting People’?”
“My dear child, of course you don’t get me.” She went to the mirror and patted her hair, then curled on the bed, with an offhand “Won’t you sit down?” and smoked elaborately, blowing the blue tendrils toward the ceiling as she continued: “Of course you don’t get it. You’re a nice sensible clerk who’ve had enough real work to do to keep you from being afraid that other people will think you’re commonplace. You don’t have to coddle yourself into working enough to earn a living by talking about temperament.
“Why, these Interesting People—You find ’em in London and New York and San Francisco just the same. They’re convinced they’re the wisest people on earth. There’s a few artists and a bum novelist or two always, and some social workers. The particular bunch that it amuses me to hate just now—and that I apparently can’t do without—they gather around Olympia Johns, who makes a kind of salon out of her rooms on Great James Street, off Theobald’s Road…. They might just as well be in New York; but they’re even stodgier. They don’t get sick of the game of being on intellectual heights as soon as New-Yorkers do.
“I’ll have to take you there. It’s a cheery sensation, you know, to find a man who has some imagination, but who has been unspoiled by Interesting People, and take him to hear them wamble. They sit around and growl and rush the growler—I hope you know growler-rushing—and rejoice that they’re free spirits. Being Free, of course, they’re not allowed to go and play with nice people, for when a person is Free, you know, he is never free to be anything but Free. That may seem confusing, but they understand it at Olympia’s.
“Of course there’s different sorts of intellectuals, and each cult despises all the others. Mostly, each cult consists of one person, but sometimes there’s two—a talker and an audience—or even three. For instance, you may be a militant and a vegetarian, but if some one is a militant and has a good figure, why then—oof!… That’s what I mean by ‘Interesting People.’ I loathe them! So, of course, being one of them, I go from one bunch to another, and, upon my honor, every single time I think that the new bunch is interesting!”
Then she smoked in gloomy silence, while Mr. Wrenn remarked, after some mental labor, “I guess they’re like cattlemen—the cattle-ier they are, the more romantic they look, and then when you get to know them the chief trouble with them is that they’re cattlemen.”
“Yes, that’s it. They’re—why, they’re—Oh, poor dear, there, there, there! It sha’n’t have so much intellekchool discussion, shall it!… I think you’re a very nice person, and I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll have a small fire, shall we? In the fireplace.”
“Yes!”