Rosa had to go to her newspaper office, and Drake saw her to the door. John rose at the same time, and Glory said, “Going already?” but she did not try to detain him. She would see him again; she had much to say to him. “I suppose you were surprised to hear that I had returned to London?” she said, looking up at his knitted brows.
He did not answer immediately, and Lord Robert, who was leaning against the chimney-piece, said in his cold drawl, “Your friend ought to be happy that you have returned to London, seems to me, my dear, instead of wasting your life in that wilderness.”
John drew himself up. “It's not London I object to,” he said; “that was inevitable, I dare say.”
“What then?”
“The profession she has come back to follow.”
“Why, what's amiss with the profession?” said Lord Robert, and Drake, who returned to the room at the moment, said: “Yes, what's amiss with it? Some of the best men in the world have belonged to it, I think.”
“Tell me the name of one of them, since the world began, who ever lived an active Christian life.”
Lord Robert made a kink of laughter, and, turning to the window, began to play a tune with his finger tips on the glass of a pane. Drake struggled to keep a straight face, and answered, “It is not their rôle, sir.”
“Very well, if that's too much to ask, tell me how many of them have done anything in real life, anything for the world, for humanity—anything whatever, I don't care what it is.”
“You are unreasonable, sir,” said Drake, “and such objections could as properly apply to the professions of the painter and the musician. These are the children of joy. Their first function is to amuse. And surely amusement has its place in real life, as you say.”