“Ah, that’s the trouble. We’re all far too complex nowadays.”

“We live in a complex age,” I returned profoundly.

“True, very true,” he replied, and twisted the ribbon of his eyeglass round one finger. “Very little is left that is simple and primitive and beautiful.”

I favoured him with the cosmic shrug of his cult, and said nothing eloquently. The understanding was complete.

Cicely Vicars’s “evening” was ground I had not hitherto explored, and I had marked for my own at once the young man drooping mincingly over the piano. He was smooth and fair, inclined to premature stoutness, and looked remotely. Mrs. Vicars informed me that he was a playwright, a dramatic critic, and a Fashion; that he promised brilliant things, and that the name under which he wrought was Eleanor Macquoid. She added that he had intuition beyond his years.

Now people went to Mrs. Vicars’s “evening” for intellectual intercourse and the exchange of ideas—an object in which they would not be balked. Carrie had said as much to me.

“You ought to come, Rol,” she had remarked on one occasion. “It’s so—it’s awfully new, Rol, really.”

“Indeed?” I had said. “In what way is it particularly—pardon me—up to date?”

“Oh,” she replied, “it’s so real, Rollo.” Then, reassuringly, “They don’t talk about the soul, you know—you needn’t be afraid of that. It’s—it’s instinct. The soul is quite too old, you know.”

“A full season behind,” I assented gravely. “And so the soul, chez Mrs. Vicars, is superseded in favour of the dilettante animal? Is that so, my sister?”

“Yes,” she agreed doubtfully, and added, “Of course there are outsiders.”

It turned out, as Caroline had said, to be Instinct, Primal Sanity, and the Elemental Paganism, and very prettily put I heard it. No one was blasÉ. They said so. They were enthusiastic. My young man declared it with an animation that brought him near to spilling the liqueur carefully poised on his knee. He spoke of the keen joy of living, delicately and epigrammatically, digressing to observe that he preferred Indian cigarettes to Brazilian, and adding that after all there was nothing like the great rough kindnesses of the Mother Earth. Cicely Vicars’s gathering was indisputably in the vanguard of the latest cry.

Mr. Eleanor Macquoid seemed to take to me, for he spoke almost immediately of “people who understand.” I was evidently admitted on sight to the mystery, and improved the occasion accordingly. I examined my finger nails—I had seen him do so—and dropped my pearls of wisdom nonchalantly, as not expecting they would be gathered up.

He was talking softly, and almost sleepily, on the picturesqueness of Mass and Brute Bulk.

“There is something quite Titanic,” he said, “in the conception of a world where nothing was as yet ruled and squared out for us; where everything was vague and shifting.”

“It is an especially gigantic thought,” I replied appreciatively. “The insistence nowadays of the Social Nexus——”

I paused, and he nodded comprehendingly at the cue.

“Yes,” he replied, “that also is true. Ah, if it were only possible to escape from the bewildering system into the clean fields and the rain-washed heather——”

“To evade the ever-present Self, and to take refuge in the great unhewn passions?” I queried gently.

“Exactly,” he replied, again carefully contemplating his nails, “to know again the crude and volcanic life. Everything is tertiary in these days—we have no primaries. Nothing rude or red.”

I forbore to challenge the remark as to rudeness, and agreed that from my observation it hardly appeared to be an age of epics. He approved, passing his hand over his sleek, clean hair.

“And yet,” he continued, judicially weighing each word, and turning to the nails of the other hand, “and yet—why? Why should we, the heirs of the centuries, be in reality the slaves of them? Why should we not love, for instance, as the rugged, forgotten ones loved? Why should we love through the post-office and by chaperonage—through engagements and marriages? Why should we not——”

He forbore to say what, and sighed, apparently for the days when he might have loved with a stone axe in untracked forests and through rivers in flood. I offered him a cigarette.

He lighted it, and gazing before him as though he were culling a nascent thought from the smoke, went on slowly and prophetically.

“Nevertheless,” he said, more softly than ever, “the strong man shall come; and when he shall appear—the man for whom we are waiting—the man who shall break the bonds and go back—back——”

It was a characteristic of most of his sentences that he finished them by watching the films of smoke before him. This time he made a remarkably perfect smoke ring. I thought of Caroline, and wondered what she was doing in such a milieu.

I was fain to speak.

“And what form of creative expression do you adopt, Mr. Macquoid?” I asked gracefully.

He replied with a modest diffidence:

“The drama. One is but a mouthpiece—a medium; yet the speech from living lips with the living person before the eyes——”

“You are doubtless right,” I replied; “words are unconvincing; things must be seen to be believed.”

He noticed nothing, and proceeded to speak of the modern French chansonette.

Now Caroline, I remembered, had, before her engagement, accounted for a large portion of her time in putting together the materials for a comedy, which, however, she had since discontinued under the somewhat exclusive demands of courtship. I had never been privileged to see the work in question, but understood that a knotty proposal scene had, coincidentally, been abandoned precisely at the time that she could, had she wished, have given it an autobiographical interest. Bassishaw’s love, besides interrupting the course of art, bade fair to cut it off altogether just when it would have given the true note that the stage, it is declared, is aching for. But even young authors have scruples in making their own affairs public, and so Caroline had willed it.

Nevertheless, it could do Caroline no harm to meet Mr. Eleanor Macquoid; and Mr. Macquoid himself could do no less than accept resignedly the latter-day limitations of love in the presence of my sister. After all, Mrs. Vicars’s salon was for the interchange of ideas.

“My sister,” I remarked, “is interested in the drama, and has herself half-realised aspirations in the way of comedy.”

Mr. Macquoid would be charmed; and I presented him. I was called away for a few moments by Mrs. Vicars. By the time I returned Mr. Macquoid was talking, his remarks being apparently directed to the point at which Caroline’s comedy had been relinquished.

“It is difficult,” he observed, with a polite interest, “to know what to do with one’s young leads nowadays. I suppose they must love—the Philistine still clings to the conventional love-theme—but it is all so stale. In the old days it was different.”

From the angle of Caroline’s chin I saw that it was anything but stale to her, and that the remark was unfortunate. She was evidently of opinion that the subject of love, however much used, had had anything but adequate treatment, and that in one or two important respects she was in a position to direct a new light on the literary treatment of it.

“What do you mean, Mr. Macquoid?” she asked.

“Merely,” he replied casually, “that there is so little dash and—and high-handedness about our modern methods of love-making. You get your couples together, and they talk in the same weary way—the same old flat talk, talk, talk——”

I smiled at the description as applied to Bassishaw, whose fluency was not remarkable, and Caroline looked coldly before her.

“You refer to the stage, Mr. Macquoid?” she asked.

“I refer to modern love-making,” he replied rashly. “We have no romantic methods left. It has become a business and a bore. When we do get it out it’s one kiss and thank Heaven it’s over.”

Caroline looked emphatic contradiction. I interposed.

“The Roman soldiery, it is related,” I said, “being once in want of wives——”

Caroline interrupted me quickly.

“I think, Mr. Macquoid,” she returned, “that people love just as passionately nowadays as they ever did.”

He might have seen what was the matter, but he was on his own subject, and went blindly at it.

“True,” he replied, “true. But the surroundings, the circumstances, the littleness of everyday life—they crush it out. We love by rule and etiquette, at social functions and in gas-lit drawing-rooms.”

I looked at Caroline for a confirmation of Bassishaw’s methods, but the personal equation was too much for her contemplation of the artistic side of the question.

“Of course we do, Mr. Macquoid,” she returned, waiving, it seemed to me, the part that had to do with the gas. “What else can we do?”

Eleanor Macquoid raised his eyebrows and shoulders in a deferential gesture that was supposed to explain the way.

“The wind still blows,” he said, “the rain, the open air——”

“The parks,” I suggested, “are already——”

“—but,” he continued, “we wear frock-coats and carry umbrellas. We marry, and our children resume the same hopeless round. There is no romance, no poetry, no heroism in it. We become engaged for a certain period to please our friends, and marry out of consideration for one another. We have no impulse, no real instinct. We have no—no militant love.”

He seemed to receive a fresh start from the last phrase, and, alas! ruined himself irretrievably.

“Why,” he exclaimed, “even those to whom we might look for a vigorous expression of it—those who lead lives of adventurous excitement—our soldiers and sailors—are just as bad. As you remarked, Mr. Butterfield, the Roman soldiers——”

The social system might be attacked, disintegrated, and shown wanting in the eyes of amateur modern paganism; the spirit of the age might be arraigned and condemned by twenty juries of the advanced salons; modish culture might stalk hock-deep in the wreckage of civilisation; but—to Caroline the prestige of the army was vested in the person of Bassishaw. Bassishaw’s mode of love-making had been compared to its disfavour with the practices of Roman legions.

She raised her head disdainfully without glancing at the unconscious Mr. Eleanor Macquoid, spoke half over her shoulder, and condemned a great nation in Bassishaw’s defence.

“I don’t think very highly, Mr. Macquoid, of the Romans. I think that when they—that on that occasion at least—they were horrid, and—and—unnecessarily rough, and that nice people would never have done it. It may make good pictures, but one would rather be a pleasant person than an unpleasant picture. And I don’t care a bit what anybody says; soldiers are just as good as—anybody else.”

And better, beyond comparison better, her shoulders seemed to say as she turned away. Macquoid shifted his other elbow to the piano, and then looked at me.

“I am afraid, Mr. Butterfield, that I have not been able to help your sister much in the play. After all, the real impulse must come from within.”

“It is,” I replied, “a pleasing reticence when the real impulse stays there. The self-sacrifice imposed by art is not necessarily a sacrifice of one’s self.”

“Very true,” he answered approvingly, and took coffee.