“Love,” said John, impatiently. “You 're a sentimentalist.”
This time Herold flared up. “If I am,” he cried, “I thank the good God who made me. This affectation of despising sentiment, this cant that a lot of you writing fellows talk, makes me sick. If a bowelless devil makes a photograph of a leprous crew in a thieves' kitchen, you say: 'Ha! Ha! Here 's the real thing. There 's no foolish sentiment here. This is LIFE!' Ugh! Of all the rotten poses of the superior young ass, this is the rottenest. Everything noble, beautiful, and splendid that has ever been written, sung, painted, or done since the world began, has been born in sentiment, has been carried through by sentiment, has been remembered and reverenced by sentiment. I hate to hear an honest man like you sneering at sentiment. You yourself took on this job through sentiment. And now when I tell you in a few simple words, 'Love that child whose destiny you 've made yourself responsible for,' you pooh-pooh the staring common sense of the proposition and call me a sentimentalist—by which you mean an infernal fool.”
John, who had bent heavy brows upon him during this harangue, took his pipe from his mouth.
“It's you who are feeding the tortoise at the wrong end,” he said unhumorously. “This is not a matter of sentiment, but of duty. I do my best to be good to the child. I 'll do the utmost I can to make reparation for what she has suffered. But as for loving her—I suppose you know what love means? As for loving this poor little slut, with her arrested development and with the torture the sight of her means to me, why, my good man, you 're talking monkey gibberish!”
Herold lit a cigarette with nervous fingers. The animation in his thin, sensitive face had not yet died away.
“I'm not talking gibberish,” he replied; “I'm talking sense.”
“Pooh!”—or something like it—said John.
“Well, super-sense, then,” cried Herold, who did not quite know what he meant, but felt certain that for the instant the term would floor his adversary. “And you 're as blind as an owl. Deep down in that poor little slut is a spark of the divine fire—love in its purest, the transcendental flame. I know it 's there. I know it as a water-finder knows there's water when the twig bends in his hands. Get at it. Find it. Fan it into a blaze. You 'll never regret it all your life long.”
John's frown deepened. “If you 're suggesting the usual asinine romance, Walter, between ward and guardian—”
Herold caught up his hat.