“There’s a feeling in the States,” he said, “that we’ve had rather a tendency to overdo work, and that there is scope for a leisure class to develop the refinement and the wider meanings of life.”
“But a leisure class doesn’t mean a class that does nothing,” said Cecily. “It only means a class that isn’t busy in business.”
“You’re too hard on me,” said Mr. Direck with that quiet smile of his.
And then by way of putting her on the defensive he asked her what she thought a man in his position ought to do.
“Something,” she said, and in the expansion of this vague demand they touched on a number of things. She said that she was a Socialist, and there was still in Mr. Direck’s composition a streak of the old-fashioned American prejudice against the word. He associated Socialists with Anarchists and deported aliens. It was manifest too that she was deeply read in the essays and dissertations of Mr. Britling. She thought everybody, man or woman, ought to be chiefly engaged in doing something definite for the world at large. (“There’s my secretaryship of the Massachusetts Modern Thought Society, anyhow,” said Mr. Direck.) And she herself wanted to be doing something—it was just because she did not know what it was she ought to be doing that she was reading so extensively and voraciously. She wanted to lose herself in something. Deep in the being of Mr. Direck was the conviction that what she ought to be doing was making love in a rapturously egotistical manner, and enjoying every scrap of her own delightful self and her own delightful vitality—while she had it, but for the purposes of their conversation he did not care to put it any more definitely than to say that he thought we owed it to ourselves to develop our personalities. Upon which she joined issue with great vigour.
“That is just what Mr. Britling says about you in his ‘American Impressions,’ ” she said. “He says that America overdoes the development of personalities altogether, that whatever else is wrong about America that is where America is most clearly wrong. I read that this morning, and directly I read it I thought, ‘Yes, that’s exactly it! Mr. Direck is overdoing the development of personalities.’ ”
“Me!”
“Yes. I like talking to you and I don’t like talking to you. And I see now it is because you keep on talking of my Personality and your Personality. That makes me uncomfortable. It’s like having someone following me about with a limelight. And in a sort of way I do like it. I like it and I’m flattered by it, and then I go off and dislike it, dislike the effect of it. I find myself trying to be what you have told me I am—sort of acting myself. I want to glance at looking-glasses to see if I am keeping it up. It’s just exactly what Mr. Britling says in his book about American women. They act themselves, he says; they get a kind of story and explanation about themselves and they are always trying to make it perfectly plain and clear to everyone. Well, when you do that you can’t think nicely of other things.”
“We like a clear light on people,” said Mr. Direck.
“We don’t. I suppose we’re shadier,” said Cecily.
“You’re certainly much more in halftones,” said Mr. Direck. “And I confess it’s the halftones get hold of me. But still you haven’t told me, Miss Cissie, what you think I ought to do with myself. Here I am, you see, very much at your disposal. What sort of business do you think it’s my duty to go in for?”
“That’s for someone with more experience than I have, to tell you. You should ask Mr. Britling.”
“I’d rather have it from you.”
“I don’t even know for myself,” she said.
“So why shouldn’t we start to find out together?” he asked.
It was her tantalising habit to ignore all such tentatives.
“One can’t help the feeling that one is in the world for something more than oneself,” she said. …
§ 8
Soon Mr. Direck could measure the time that was left to him at the Dower House no longer by days but by hours. His luggage was mostly packed, his tickets to Rotterdam, Cologne, Munich, Dresden, Vienna, were all in order. And things were still very indefinite between him and Cecily. But God has not made Americans clean-shaven and firm-featured for nothing, and he determined that matters must be brought to some sort of definition before he embarked upon travels that were rapidly losing their attractiveness in this concentration of his attention. …
A considerable nervousness betrayed itself in his voice and manner when at last he carried out his determination.
“There’s just a lil’ thing,” he said to her, taking advantage of a moment when they were together after lunch, “that I’d value now more than anything else in the world.”
She answered by a lifted eyebrow and a glance that had not so much inquiry in it as she intended.
“If we could just take a lil’ walk together for a bit. Round by Claverings Park and all that. See the deer again and the old trees. Sort of scenery I’d like to remember when I’m away from it.”
He was a little short of breath, and there was a quite disproportionate gravity about her moment for consideration.
“Yes,” she said with a cheerful acquiescence that came a couple of bars too late. “Let’s. It will be jolly.”
“These fine English afternoons are wonderful afternoons,” he remarked after a moment or so of silence. “Not quite the splendid blaze we get in our summer, but—sort of glowing.”
“It’s been very fine all the time you’ve been here,” she said. …
After which exchanges they went along the lane, into the road by the park fencing, and so to the little gate that lets one into the park, without another word.
The idea took hold of Mr. Direck’s mind that until they got through the park gate it would be
