“And the world,—and the world?” Tom argued. “You are living in the world. It touches you on every side, at every instant. You are wrong to try to ignore or to despise it.”
Usually, Cornelia answered for her friend.
“We are the world, if we choose to have it so. What you mean by the world is only the gross and the impure. Why alloy yourself with that?”
Tom laughed. He knew this was David working upon his sister. Her life and her work were essentially conformist. She was no hermit, no rebel. She had had her great revolt, she had settled. She was not so very different from him. But Tom was too wise to say these things before their friend. To humiliate Cornelia before David would have the effect of estranging him. David would judge him and not understand. The idea that he could influence Cornelia was beyond David’s belief.... All this behind Tom’s laughing.
He kept silent, above all kept pleasant. He saw Cornelia’s motherhood once more hunting and hungry. She was going to preserve David from a hostile world, though it be with her own body. He watched her passion and David’s dispassionate compliance. He worked his own will when they were alone.
“Cornelia has a habit I can well enough understand of wishing to make my friends into what she would have liked to be, herself.”
“Isn’t she what she would like to be herself?” asked David.
Tom smiled, and was serious. “To succeed, for most of us, means breaking through an iron barrier. Even those of us who do so cannot escape a little maiming.”
“You are so violent in your statements, Tom!” The idea of Cornelia maimed was nonsense to him.
They went on talking of her new season’s work.