"Of course they do; they must; rubbish is the breath in their nostrils."

She painted away, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g her eyes almost shut and getting very close to her picture. He had never thought her so plain; she was letting her mouth hang open. He wondered why she was so charming; but when she stepped back rhythmically, tilting her pretty head this way and that, he saw why: it was her unfailing grace. She suddenly remembered her mouth and shut it to say, "Well?"

"Well, some people have come back at me. They've said, What a rotten number this or that was! They were right; and yet there were things in all those magazines better than anything they had ever printed. What's to be done about it? I can't ask people to buy truck or read truck because it comes bound up with essays and stories and poems of the first quality."

"No. You can't. Why," she asked, drifting up to her picture again, "don't you tear the bad out, and sell the good?"

Erlcort gave a disdainful sound, such as cannot be spelled in English.

"Do you know how defiantly the bad is bound up with the good in the magazines? They're wired together, and you could no more tear out the bad and leave the good than you could part vice from virtue in human nature."

"I see," Margaret Green said, but she saw no further, and she had to let him go disconsolate. After waiting a decent time she went to find him in his critical bookstore. It was late in an afternoon of the days that were getting longer, and only one electric was lighted in the rear of the room, where Erlcort sat before the fireless Franklin stove, so busy at something that he scarcely seemed aware of her.

"What in the world are you doing?" she demanded.

He looked up. "Who? I? Oh, it's you! Why, I'm merely censoring the truck in the May number of this magazine." He held up a little roller, as long as the magazine was wide, blacked with printer's ink, which he had been applying to the open periodical. "I've taken a hint from the way the Russian censorship blots out seditious literature before it lets it go to the public."

"And _what_ a mess you're making!"

"Of course it will have to dry before it's put on sale."

"I should think so. Listen to me, Frederick Erlcort: you're going crazy."

"I've sometimes thought so: crazy with conceit and vanity and arrogance. Who am I that I should set up for a critical bookstore-keeper? What is the Republic of Letters, anyway? A vast, benevolent, generous democracy, where one may have what one likes, or a cold oligarchy where he is compelled to take what is good for him?

Is it a restricted citizenship, with a minority representation, or is it universal suffrage?"

"Now," Margaret Green said, "you are talking sense. Why didn't you think of this in the beginning?"

"Is it a world, a whole earth," he went on, "where the weeds mostly outflourish the flowers, or is it a wretched little florist's conservatory where the watering-pot a.s.sumes to better the instruction of the rain which falls upon the just and the unjust? What is all the worthy family of a.s.ses to do if there are no thistles to feed them?

Because the succulent fruits and nourishing cereals are better for the finer organisms, are the coa.r.s.er not to have fodder? No; I have made a mistake. Literature is the whole world; it is the expression of the gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, and it is the pleasure of the gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, as well as the expression and the pleasure of the wise, the fine, the elect. Let the mult.i.tude have their truck, their rubbish, their rot; it may not be the truck, the rubbish, the rot that it would be to us, or may slowly and by natural selection become to certain of them. But let there be no artificial selection, no survival of the fittest by main force--the force of the spectator, who thinks he knows better than the creator of the ugly and the beautiful, the fair and foul, the evil and good."

"Oh, _now_ if the Intellectual Club could hear you!" Margaret Green said, with a long, deep, admiring suspiration. "And what are you going to do with your critical bookstore?"

"I'm going to sell it. I've had an offer from the author of that best-seller--I've told you about him. I was just trying to censor that magazine while I was thinking it over. He's got an idea. He's going to keep it a critical bookstore, but the criticism is to be made by universal suffrage and the will of the majority. The latest books will be put to a vote; and the one getting the greatest number of votes will be the first offered for sale, and the author will receive a free pa.s.sage to Europe by the southern route."

"The southern route!" Margaret mused. "I've never been that way. It must be delightful."

"Then come with _me_! _I'm_ going."

"But how can I?"

"By marrying me!"

"I never thought of that," she said. Then, with the conscientious resolution of an elderly girl who puts her fate to the touch of any risk the truth compels, she added: "Or, yes! I _have_. But I never supposed you would ask me." She stared at him, and she was aware she was letting her mouth hang open. While she was trying for some word to close it with he closed it for her.

XIV

A FEAST OF REASON

Florindo and Lindora had come to the end of another winter in town, and had packed up for another summer in the country. They were sitting together over their last breakfast until the taxi should arrive to whirl them away to the station, and were brooding in a joint gloom from the effect of the dinner they had eaten at the house of a friend the night before, and, "Well, thank goodness," she said, "there is an end to that sort of thing for _one_ while."

"An end to _that_ thing," he partially a.s.sented, "but not that _sort_ of thing."

"What do you mean?" she demanded excitedly, almost resentfully.

"I mean that the lunch is of the nature of the dinner, and that in the country we shall begin lunching where we left off dining."

"Not instantly," she protested shrilly. "There will be n.o.body there for a while--not for a whole month, nearly."

"They will be there before you can turn round, almost; and then you women will begin feeding one another there before you have well left off here."

"We women!" she protested.

"Yes, you--you women. You give the dinners. Can you deny it?"

"It's because we can't get you to the lunches."

"In the country you can; and so you will give the lunches."

"We would give dinners if it were not for the distance, and the darkness on those bad roads."

"I don't see where your reasoning is carrying you."

"No," she despaired, "there is no reason in it. No sense. How tired of it all I am! And, as you say, it will be no time before it is all going on again."

They computed the number of dinners they had given during the winter; that was not hard, and the sum was not great: six or seven at the most, large and small. When it came to the dinners they had received, it was another thing; but still she considered, "Were they really so few? It's nothing to what the English do. They never dine alone at home, and they never dine alone abroad--of course not! I wonder they can stand it. I think a dinner, the happy-to-accept kind, is always loathsome: the everlasting soup, if there aren't oysters first, or grape-fruit, or melon, and the fish, and the entree, and the roast and salad, and the ice-cream and the fruit n.o.body touches, and the coffee and cigarettes and cigars--how I hate it all!"

Lindora sank back in her chair and toyed desperately with the fragment of bacon on her plate.

"And yet," Florindo said, "there is a charm about the first dinner of autumn, after you've got back."

"Oh, yes," she a.s.sented; "it's like a part of our lost youth. We think all the dinners of the winter will be like that, and we come away beaming."

"But when it keeps on and there's more and more of our lost youth, till it comes to being the whole--"

"Florindo!" she stopped him. He pretended that he was not going to have said it, and she resumed, dreamily, "I wonder what it is makes it so detestable as the winter goes on."

"All customs are detestable, the best of them," he suggested, "and I should say, in spite of the first autumnal dinner, that the society dinner was an unlovely rite. You try to carry if off with china and gla.s.s, and silver and linen, and if people could fix their minds on these, or even on the dishes of the dinner as they come successively on, it would be all very well; but the diners, the diners!"

"Yes," she said, "the old men are hideous, certainly; and the young ones--I try not to look at them, poking things into the hollows of their faces with spoons and forks--"

"Better than when it was done with knives! Still, it's a horror! A veteran diner-out in full action is certainly a hideous spectacle.

Often he has few teeth of his own, and the dentists don't serve him perfectly. He is in danger of dropping things out of his mouth, both liquids and solids: better not look! His eyes bulge and roll in his head in the stress of mastication and deglut.i.tion; his color rises and spreads to his gray hair or over his baldness; his person seems to swell vividly in his chair, and when he laughs--"

"Don't, Florindo! It _is_ awful."