‘Oh, certainly, Miss Marcia, we all know that your father had no thought of deliberately harming Italy or any other country. And, as a matter of fact, the American wheat corner has not had so much to do with the trouble as the Italian government would have us believe. The simple truth is that your father has been used as a scapegoat. While the Roman papers have been suggestively silent on many points, they have had much to say of the American Wheat King.’
‘Have the things they said been very bad?’
Sybert smiled a trifle.
‘There’s not been much, to tell the truth, that he will care to cut out and paste in his scrap-book.’
‘Our party, next week, seems heartless, doesn’t it—sort of like giving a ball while the people next door are having a funeral? I wanted to give it up, but Uncle Howard looked so hurt when I proposed it that I didn’t say anything more about it.’
‘No, certainly not. That would be foolish and useless. Because some people have to be unhappy is no reason why all should be.’
‘I suppose not,’ she agreed slowly; and then she added, ‘The world used to be so much pleasanter to live in before I knew there was any misery in it—I wish I didn’t have to know!’
‘Miss Marcia, I told you the other day that it was a relief sometimes to see people who are thoroughly, irresponsibly happy; who dance over the pit without knowing it’s there. A man who has been in the pit, who knows all its horrors—who feels as if he reeked with them—likes occasionally to see some one who doesn’t even know of its existence. And yet in the end do you think he can thoroughly respect such blindness? Don’t you feel that you are happier in a worthier sense when you look at life with your eyes open; when you honestly take the bad along with the good?’
She sat silent for a few minutes, apparently considering his words. Presently he added—
‘As for your party, I think you may dance with a free conscience. You’ve done what you could to help matters on, and you’ll do a great deal more in the future.’
‘I’m afraid that my conscience didn’t have much to do with wanting to give up the ball,’ she acknowledged, with a slightly guilty laugh. ‘It’s simply that I can’t bear to meet people, and feel that all the time they’re talking to me they’re calling me in their minds “the Wheat Princess.”’
‘That, I suppose you know, is very silly. It’s the price you have to pay, and I haven’t much sympathy to offer. However, you need not let it bother you; for, as a matter of fact, there will not be many men here, who would not be wheat kings themselves if they had the chance—even knowing beforehand all the suffering it was going to bring to this trouble-ridden country. And now, suppose we don’t talk about wheat any more. You’ve thought about it a good deal too much.’
‘You’re not very optimistic,’ she said.
‘Oh, well, I’m not blind. It takes an Italian to be optimistic in this country.’
‘Do you like the Italians, or don’t you?’ she asked. ‘Sometimes you seem to, and sometimes you act as if you despised them.’
‘Yes, certainly I like them; I was born in Italy.’
‘But you’re an American,’ she said quickly.
He laughed at her tone.
‘You surely want to be an American,’ she insisted.
‘As Henry James says, Miss Marcia, one’s country, like one’s grandmother, is antecedent to choice.’
She studied the fire for some time without speaking, and Sybert, leaning back lazily, studied her. Her next observation surprised him.
‘You said the other day, Mr. Sybert, that every man lived for some idea, and I’ve been wondering what yours was.’
A curious expression flashed over his face.
‘You couldn’t expect me to tell; I’m a diplomatist.’
‘I have an idea that it is not very much connected with diplomacy.’
‘In which case it would be poor diplomacy for me to give it away.’
‘Mr. Sybert, you give a person a queer impression, as if you were acting a part all the time, and didn’t want people to know what you were really like.’
‘An anarchist must be careful; the police–’
‘I believe you are one!’ she cried.
‘Don’t be alarmed. I assure you I am not. But,’ he added, with a little flash of fire, ‘I swear, in a country like this, one would like to be—anything for action! Oh, I’m not a fool,’ he added, in response to her smile. ‘We’re living in the nineteenth century, and not in the thirteenth. Anarchy belongs to the dark ages as much as feudalism.’
‘You’re so difficult to place! I like to know whether people are Democrats or Republicans, and whether they are Presbyterians or Episcopalians. Then one always knows where to find them, and is not in danger of hurting their feelings.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t claim any such respectable connexions as those,’ Sybert laughed.
‘Half the time one would think you were a Catholic by the way you stand up for the priests; the other half one would think you weren’t anything by the way you abuse them.’
‘This mania for classifying! What difference if a person calls himself a Catholic or a Baptist, a Unitarian or a Buddhist? It’s all one. A man is not necessarily irreligious because he doesn’t subscribe to any cut-and-dried formulae.’
‘Mr. Sybert,’ she dared, ‘I used to be terribly suspicious of you. I knew you weren’t just the way you appeared, and I thought you were really rather bad; but I’m beginning to believe you’re unusually good.’
‘Oh, I say, Miss Marcia! What are you trying to get at? Do you want me to confess to a hair shirt underneath my dinner-jacket?—I am afraid you must leave that to our friend the monk, up on his mountain-top.’
‘No, I didn’t mean just that. Flagellations and hair shirts strike me as a pretty useless sort of goodness.’
‘It does seem a poor business,’ he agreed, ‘for a strong young fellow like that to give up his whole life to the work of getting his soul into paradise.’
‘Still, if he wants paradise that much, and is willing to make the sacrifice–’
‘It’s setting a pretty high value on his own soul. I should never rate mine as being worth a lifetime of effort.’
‘I suppose a person’s soul is worth whatever price he chooses to set.’
‘Oh, of course, if a man keeps his soul in a bandbox he can produce it immaculate in the end; but what’s a soul for if it’s not for use? He would much better live in the world with his fellow-men, and help them keep their souls clean, even at the risk of getting his own a little dusty.’
‘Yes, perhaps that’s true,’ she conceded. ‘Such dust will doubtless brush off in the end.’
‘It certainly ought, if things are managed right.’
‘I can’t help feeling sorry, though, for the poor young monk; he will be so disappointed, when he brings out his shiny new soul, to find that it doesn’t rank any higher than some of the dusty ones that have been dragged through the world.’
‘It will serve him right,’ Sybert declared. ‘He ought to have been thinking of other people’s souls instead of his own.’
‘“‘Tis a dangerous thing to play with souls, and matter enough to save one’s own,”’ quoted Marcia.
‘Oh, well,’ he shrugged, ‘I won’t argue, with the poet and the priests both against me; but still–’
‘You think that your speckled soul is exactly as good at other people’s white souls?’