Armstrong sank back in his chair lazily.
“All right, Darley,” he accepted; “when you won’t be serious there’s no use trying to make you so. I surrender.”
“Serious!” Roberts looked at the younger man peculiarly. “Serious!” he echoed low. “That’s just where your diagnosis fails, my friend. It’s the explanation as well why I never did those ‘other things,’ as you call them, that students do and so humanize themselves.” Involuntarily his eyes went to the girl’s face, searched it with a glance. “It is, I suppose, the curse of my life: the fact that I can’t be different. I seem to be incapable of digressing, even if I want to.”
For answer Armstrong smiled his sceptical smile; but the girl did not notice. Instead, for the first time, she asked a question.
“And you still think to digress, to enjoy oneself, is not serious, Mr. Roberts?” she asked. 60
“No, emphatically not. I’m human, I hope, even if I haven’t been humanized. I think enjoyment of life by the individual is its chief end. It’s nature.”
“But you said—”
“Pardon me,” quickly; “I couldn’t have made myself clear then. We’re each of us a law unto himself, Miss Gleason. What is pleasure to me, perhaps, is not pleasure to you. I said I was never asked to join a fraternity. It’s true. It’s equally true, though, that I wouldn’t have joined had I been asked. So with the social side. I wouldn’t have been a society man if I’d had a new dress suit annually and a valet to keep it pressed. I simply was not originally bent that way. Killing time, politely called recreation, merely fails to afford me pleasure. For that reason I avoid it. I claim no credit for so doing. It’s not consecration to duty at all, it’s pure selfishness. I’m as material as a steam engine. My pleasure comes from doing things; material things, practical things. For a given period of time my pleasure is in being able to point to a given object accomplished and say to myself: there, ‘Darley, old man, you started out to do it and you’ve done it.’ Is that clear, Miss Gleason?” 61
“And if you don’t accomplish it, what then?” commented Armstrong.
“I shall at least have tried,” returned the other, carelessly. “I can call the attention of Saint Peter to that fact.”