“So you think that just as a time goes to pieces
its houses ought to go too?”
“Of course! Would you value your Keats
letter if the signature was traced over to make it
last longer? It’s just because I love the
past that I want this house to look back on its glamourous
moment of youth and beauty, and I want its stairs
to creak as if to the footsteps of women with hoop
skirts and men in boots and spurs. But they’ve
made it into a blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty.
It hasn’t any right to look so prosperous.
It might care enough for Lee to drop a brick now and
then. How many of these—these animals”—she
waved her hand around—“get anything
from this, for all the histories and guide-books and
restorations in existence? How many of them who
think that, at best, appreciation is talking in undertones
and walking on tiptoes would even come here if it
was any trouble? I want it to smell of magnolias
instead of peanuts and I want my shoes to crunch on
the same gravel that Lee’s boots crunched on.
There’s no beauty without poignancy and there’s
no poignancy without the feeling that it’s going,
men, names, books, houses—bound for dust—mortal—”
A small boy appeared beside them and, swinging a handful
of banana-peels, flung them valiantly in the direction
of the Potomac.
SENTIMENT
Simultaneously with the fall of Liege, Anthony and
Gloria arrived in New York. In retrospect the
six weeks seemed miraculously happy. They had
found to a great extent, as most young couples find
in some measure, that they possessed in common many
fixed ideas and curiosities and odd quirks of mind;
they were essentially companionable.
But it had been a struggle to keep many of their conversations
on the level of discussions. Arguments were fatal
to Gloria’s disposition. She had all her
life been associated either with her mental inferiors
or with men who, under the almost hostile intimidation
of her beauty, had not dared to contradict her; naturally,
then, it irritated her when Anthony emerged from the
state in which her pronouncements were an infallible
and ultimate decision.
He failed to realize, at first, that this was the
result partly of her “female” education
and partly of her beauty, and he was inclined to include
her with her entire sex as curiously and definitely
limited. It maddened him to find she had no sense
of justice. But he discovered that, when a subject
did interest her, her brain tired less quickly than
his. What he chiefly missed in her mind was the
pedantic teleology—the sense of order and
accuracy, the sense of life as a mysteriously correlated
piece of patchwork, but he understood after a while
that such a quality in her would have been incongruous.
Of the things they possessed in common, greatest of
all was their almost uncanny pull at each other’s
hearts. The day they left the hotel in Coronado
she sat down on one of the beds while they were packing,
and began to weep bitterly.
