Wyllis brushed the ashes of his pipe away from the silk handkerchief that was knotted about his neck and stared moodily off at the sky-line.
“No, you’re mistaken. This would bore you after a while. You can’t shake the fever of the other life. I’ve tried it. There was a time when the gay fellows of Rome could trot down into the Thebaid and burrow into the sandhills and get rid of it. But it’s all too complex now. You see we’ve made our dissipations so dainty and respectable that they’ve gone further in than the flesh, and taken hold of the ego proper. You couldn’t rest, even here. The war-cry would follow you.”
“You don’t waste words, Wyllis, but you never miss fire. I talk more than you do, without saying half so much. You must have learned the art of silence from these taciturn Norwegians. I think I like silent men.”
“Naturally,” said Wyllis, “since you have decided to marry the most brilliant talker you know.”
Both were silent for a time, listening to the sighing of the hot wind through the parched morning-glory vines. Margaret spoke first.
“Tell me, Wyllis, were many of the Norwegians you used to know as interesting as Eric Hermannson?”
“Who, Siegfried? Well, no. He used to be the flower of the Norwegian youth in my day, and he’s rather an exception, even now. He has retrograded, though. The bonds of the soil have tightened on him, I fancy.”
“Siegfried? Come, that’s rather good, Wyllis. He looks like a dragon-slayer. What is it that makes him so different from the others? I can talk to him; he seems quite like a human being.”
“Well,” said Wyllis, meditatively, “I don’t read Bourget as much as my cultured sister, and I’m not so well up in analysis, but I fancy it’s because one keeps cherishing a perfectly unwarranted suspicion that under that big, hulking anatomy of his, he may conceal a soul somewhere. Nicht wahr?”
“Something like that,” said Margaret, thoughtfully, “except that it’s more than a suspicion, and it isn’t groundless. He has one, and he makes it known, somehow, without speaking.”