“Warm as toast in England; perfect English spring this year.”
“Oh, no doubt of it; spring’s the time for England,” Ware asserted.
“Fall for New England,” said Ware’s sister. “But tell me,” she went on, “you were talking of saving complements. What are the saving complements over there just now?”
“There aren’t any.” Vinton’s voice was suddenly sombre.
“I should think not!” It came from brother and sister at once.
A moment passed before Vinton turned from the fire and let his eyes wander from the pale yellow heads of the daffodils nodding in the easterly May air outside to the cool tints of the Lowestoft bowl on which some Chinese artisan a century before had picked out the initials of a merchant-sailor grandfather in pale tints of blue and gold and which now stood in the centre of the table filled with sprays of the rhodora. “Yes,” he said slowly, “I suppose there are saving complements of a sort if one is heroic enough to find them, but—well, one can hardly— What shall I say? Everything over there—I mean all sorts of what you’d call merely material objects—is being charged, I believe, with some kind of spiritual essence that is going to be indefinitely active to future contact.”
He looked across the table to where Ware sat with his chair a little pushed back, and laughed. “The intolerant old Puritan thinks I’m off again, doesn’t he?” he said almost archly. Then he glanced about the room once more. “I think,” he continued, “that there is an extraordinary beauty of a kind about our old houses over here—a charm, too, although I’ve never been able to analyze it, for, after all, you know, there’s nothing in them!”
“The Puritan,” he began to explain, “belonged peculiarly to the race that in England had always opposed all of what one may call the sensory elements that were of such immense appeal to the race of the Cavaliers, for I believe that the two did spring from essentially different roots.
“‘A primrose by a river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.’”
“What more does it need to be?” Ware protested, and “Ah! there you are,” Vinton responded. “But don’t you see, after all, such negation never created”—he laughed a little again. “Never created an—an—”