“But it would go a-begging if you did not have it,” he replied, laughing. “Come, don't let us say anything more about it. You are happy with your own home and interests, and I am happy in seeing you and having your friendship. Of course I have suffered a bit, but it's all over now.”
“Ah!” she said. “Life seems to be made up of that.”
“Of what?”
“Suffering.”
He waved an energetic protest with his ash stick.
“Since when have you grown a pessimist? I don't believe in it. Life is made up of responsibilities and interests. There's suffering in it of course; but there are alleviations. It's like cold and frost. If you stood up without a rag on in the snow you'd think the world was made of nothing else but frost. But you put on warm clothing and defy it.”
“But the poor, ill-clad, shivering wretches—what about them?”
“I'm talking of people with average material wealth,” he replied. “That's just it. So can the people of ordinary moral wealth clothe themselves against suffering. I don't like the morbid view of things. It doesn't do any good. Do you remember a passage in Longfellow's 'Hyperion'—a criticism of two German poets—'melancholy gentlemen to whom life was only a dismal swamp, upon whose margin they walked with cambric handkerchiefs in their hands, sobbing and sighing, and making signals to Death to come and ferry them over the lake'? It's a bit fierce on your pessimists; but it's a wholesome little passage to remember.”
A little while after this they parted. Kent walked on, swinging his stick, convinced of Clytie's happiness, yet wondering at her unusual note of pessimism, and Clytie called a cab, as she was late, and drove home with a world of strange and troubling thoughts.
On the 1st of August Clytie received a visit from the boy Jack, who had just come to London for his summer holiday. He had grown greatly during the past year, had filled out. The taint of the street had gone from him and he was becoming civilised. Clytie leaned back in her chair and looked at him curiously as he sat, in all the self-consciousness of a newly awakened sense of propriety, upon the edge of his seat, twirling his glengarry cap. As an artistic object he had deteriorated. The motive of his worth in that respect had gone with the picturesqueness of his old garments and dirt and wild elf locks; but he was handsome in spite of his cropped brown hair and the severity of his attire. Indeed there was something incongruous in the corduroy uniform and the refinement of his face, with its bright dark eyes and finely cut lips that disclosed a perfect row of white, even teeth. And yet there was cruelty around the mouth, the sublimated essence of the fierce savagery that Clytie had impressed upon her famous picture. He had been transformed from the animal into the human being, it is true; but that does not necessarily imply that the human being does not retain many of the passions of the animal. With the old Jack the untamable was degradingly confused with lowness, but it shone out all the clearer now by reason of the humanising of his face. Clytie noted all this as they talked together.