Sir Enguerrand knew of Renaud’s poverty and, looking at his naked brown breast, extended his hand and touched it with an experimental, unfeeling gesture. He then sent a message to the neighboring castle which reared its pointed roof above the woods, and invited the seneschal and his two daughters to be his guests three days later and see some falcons fly, after they by their presence had heightened the solemnity of punishing a thief—and they were to come before daybreak.
Renaud’s eyes had widened from the darkness of the prison; they were black and motionless, and the gleaming pupils contracted but slowly to mirror the thin-worn clouds and rising sun of the east. Behind Sir Enguerrand was borne the Iceland falcon, its talons fiercely clasped in the glove, with the hood over its wakeful and famished glances that had not seen food for three days.
But further behind curved a line of color that flamed and burned: six bright horses, almost blue in the gloaming, were led by pages at a run, with cloths of red velvet on their bending necks. Red was the wagon which they drew, and within it gold shone heavy on the tender bosoms and slender arms of the seneschal’s daughters. Six damsels rode after it with hair blonde as grain, theirpointed feet playing beneath the hem of their kirtles; six huntsmen blew calls which seemed to dance and swing like wheels from the mouths of the crooked horns. The contours of the plain danced with them and shot past one another in wine-colored mist, while the clouds above had glittering borders like the wings of butterflies.
The party formed into a semi-circle, plume by plume, shoulder by shoulder, around a bush where the captive was tied. The horsecloths flapped in the wind; the red taking on depth in the shadow, heavy as hopeless yearning; the red burning in the light, gay as the clamor of victory. The maidens’ delicate necks leaned forward out of the wagon, and their conical hoods flowed into one with the descending line of their shoulders. They were like herons, thought Renaud, and he almost expected to hear them add a shrill shriek, when the notes of the horns fell far away like hurled stones, and all became silent. But when he saw them more plainly with their thin, straight lips and strange, dreaming eyes, which were always leveled in a chill ecstasy on something infinitely distant, and their white, indolent hands in their laps, and the long folds of their garments—they seemed to him wondrously beautiful, like the most gorgeous saints’ pictures with a dimming glow of wax tapers at their feet, and it pained him thatthey should see him bound. He let his gaze leap further, past the damsels—shy, jaunty birds that he wanted to frighten with a whistle—past the red faces and inquisitively gaping mouths of the grooms, past the brown plain, where he had run himself tired and dreamed himself tired.
He knew what doom awaited him, but when the Iceland falcon was borne forward and he realized it was this which was to exact the penalty, he laughed in his joy, and his heart throbbed with pride, as when he possessed the bird and the long sunny days and the plain with the listening winds and the swaying trees of autumn yellow.
When the falcon beheld the light and turned to look around, it gathered its strength for flight, expecting to be swung on the arm of the bearer, while its glances rapidly sought its prey in the air; these glances were sharp and fierce with hunger, flaming as with sparks, and they had no memory in their depths, they recognized no one. But Renaud’s eyes were fixed in anxious searching on those of the bird and were filled with tears of sorrow at not meeting them. They should have mirrored his life’s bold longing, his contempt, and his dreams on the red heather, but they only waited greedily for their prey, grimly and coldly as the human spirit of curiosity or jesting on the thin lips of Sir Enguerrand. He felt his sorrow smart more bitterly than before and turned asidehis head to recover himself, his eyelids closed and his thoughts fluttering.
He lay thus while the herald proclaimed the law—“twelve sols of silver—six ounces of flesh over the heart—thus does Sir Enguerrand safeguard the pastime of the nobles.” He did not look up when his skin was cut so that the scent of blood should attract the falcon, and when it sank its beak in his breast he gave no cry, merely trembled, so that the bird’s eyes flamed up in rage and its wings were spread out as if to beat.
The seneschal’s daughters leaned their heads forward with a gleam of interest in their strange dreaming eyes, but they did not raise their hands from their laps, and their garments lay as before in tranquil folds. The horses snorted at the smell of blood and stamped on the frosty ground so that the red horsecloths flapped against the pallor of the deepening blue, but Renaud lay silent, and the huntsmen stood needlessly with expanded cheeks and horns to their mouths ready to drown his cries.
The first agony had clutched at his finest fibres, it seemed as if his heart would come out with them; but afterwards he had grown numb almost to the degree of pleasure, and while the blood flowed warmly from the wound, and the pointed beak tore at his breast, Renaud dreamed himself into the high blue heaven of his visions, until heunderstood everything, death and honor, feeling how it burned and dazzled—the yellow sunlight of heroic story.
When Sir Enguerrand thought that the legal six ounces had been paid, he gave his men a sign to blow, and the falcon was lifted off, sated with blood, its eyes filled once more with tranquil pride, and the troop set itself in motion more gaily even than before toward the sedge that gleamed yellow in the distance. But Renaud could not be wakened, he had dreamed himself to death, and they merely loosed him and let him lie with the red heather under his head.
The Iceland falcon, however, might never sit on its master’s hand, for Sir Enguerrand did not care to drink of a cup where another’s lips had pressed a kiss.
WE had sat in the studio since just after dinner—a couple of us had not had any dinner either—and had talked, talked the whole time.
We liked to talk, we had each and every one of us convictions and opinions so firm that they impressed all the others; yes, even ourselves, as we thought them over. Some had also a share of scepticism, which at suitable moments was still more impressive; and a couple simply kept quiet, which was almost the most impressive of all. To be really deeply silent under wide puffs of cigar smoke, with a broad back against the wall, and a large indolent glance out of wide-open eyes, which during the climax of a speaker are turned away in good-natured boredom—there is surely nothing in this realm of insolvent currency that is sounder and gives one longer credit.
But now we were nearly all talking about nearly everything except politics and religion, for we had come past the years when one takes such things earnestly and had not come to the years when one takes them practically. Furthermorewe had all read at least a couple of French novels and so had got over all naïveté. But we touched on the subject of hypnotism, very carefully with a general feeling that “there was something in it.” Literature we gripped by the throat and said rough things to her face, thrusting at her a word sharp as a needle, the word “style.” That was what she lacked, style. It is a splendid word, this; one can hide as much or as little as one will behind it, and as an accusation it is almost instantly condemnatory. And so we talked about pictures and busts and verse, of synthesis and analysis, of symbolism and realism. We were all idealists and wrapped ourselves in the very newest imperial robes with genuine spangles of brass.
I don’t know exactly what we were driving at, the utterances were so varied, but it came out clearly from the total that we had the deuce knows what resources within us and were some day going to shake new artistic tendencies out of our sleeves as easily as the trick man does rabbits. Among some of us there was a general flair for the joy of living, which was taken up most seriously and discussed—a bit tediously—as a settled duty; how one should attain to it was left to one’s own free discretion and it was assumed that he who went to sleep over “Hans Alienus” had a satisfactory private reason for his conduct and might take up gymnastics instead.
But above everything we were zealous for “the new”; we held our fingers on the pulse of the time with the solemnity of one who had universal pills to sell, and were only afraid that others would get ahead of us in guessing its complaints, or that these would change, since everything progresses so fast now.
Leo had then walked about a while, taken an oblique stand where he cut diagonals across the room, and snapped his fingers at every æsthetic dogma that had ever been devised—lively, indefatigable Leo, with his sharp, somewhat affected painter’s glance from behind his glasses, and his handsome, exalted countenance as of a patentee of ideas; Leo, who talked the most of all and made the greatest effect.
“Oh, the devil take it!” he had cried—his accent was half that of a Parisian and half that of a mountaineer—“I’ve a pain in the head. I beg leave to take the air a bit.”
A moment later the door had slammed, and one might as well have tried to catch the shadow of a bird as get hold of him. Also, no one else cared to go, since it was snowing outside, and furthermore the day was so gray, so strikingly empty and melancholy; the sort of day that stares at one searchingly, haunting one like a question to which one can find no answer. But Leo went out in all weathers, distance had no meaning tohim; he walked so fast that the cold could not bite through his thin overcoat, and besides he swore himself warm at it, fighting it as if it was a personal enemy and keeping his brain ready to note every beautiful composition of lines that he passed.
We knew that in a short while he might be back with us again after he had hurried almost around the city, his headache gone and his buoyant figure full of nervous energy, with fresh air in his clothes, his glasses damp with cold, and a new theory of chiaroscuro in his head. We therefore continued meanwhile to discuss along the same line as before. The question rose of what the soul of a masterpiece consisted, to what degree it should be manifest, and what share emotion should play. We agreed that the artist’s feeling should be suppressed and only reveal its immeasurable power in lines of form; otherwise it might destroy the proper effect, and a tendency toward declamation could not be tolerated under any condition. We said a number of very telling things, but nevertheless felt a bit weary, either from the yellow lamplight or because the air was a trifle close.
Thereupon we heard Leo talking outside the front door. He had someone with him, then. But whom, since we were all here? We turned inquisitively in the direction of the door. Itopened and over the threshold stepped a little, dark figure with an ugly black hat on her head, a summer hat whose brim was bent with age and cast a grotesque shadow on the wall. She was a little girl, but what sort of girl?
A strange girl, to be sure. Without hesitating a moment and before anyone said anything, she came into the middle of the room, stood still and looked about her with a reposeful movement of the head, her hands in the pockets of her cape, her whole slender figure wonderfully composed and firm, her motion somewhat like a figure in a dream, when one all the while thinks: just so, that’s what she ought to do,—and yet feels with mysterious uneasiness that every gesture has meaning, every step hides the significance of coming events.
While she stood there close to the hanging lamp, which threw a sharp, dark shadow across her face, Leo explained hurriedly: “I met her by the street-car line. She was walking and staring up at the snow just as you see her with her head thrown back, walking slowly in all the cold. I saw she was pretty with a well-formed head and wanted to find out who she was. She wasn’t at all afraid to come along.”
“Take off your hat,” he added eagerly; “I haven’t had a good look at you yet.”
She took off her hat, went toward the door, andlaid it with her cape on a chair, always with the same remarkable composure of movement. Then she came forward to the light again, and now we could see her face clearly.
It was pale and narrow, but not small in proportion to her figure. The chin was strong, projecting, especially as she held her head very high, and her profile ran into it prettily from the rounded cranium. The nose was straight, the lips straight and pale, the contour of the cheek uncommonly severe and beautiful, the eyebrows a little sunk towards the middle; and the eyes, partly shut against the light, looked steadily and calmly out from under short, dark lashes. Her hair, too, was dark. It was hard to tell the color of the eyes, which seemed to shift from the suggestion of gray that violets have at twilight to the glimmer of the darkest lake. Also their size must have been more variable than usual, for according to the thought that burned in them they widened with distended pupils, or closed around the steel blades of her glance;—the muscles around them were indicated under the skin with uncommon sharpness.
Her figure was slim and childish, that of a city girl of fifteen; the neck slender and supple. Every expression of the face was childish, too, but her general appearance bore the stamp of firmness,of set character, which comes from living life all the way through.
She looked at us without letting her glance rest on anyone, looked beyond us at the studies on the wall, pausing a little longer there, till at last her gaze met the yellow dials of the clock in the church tower as it stared in through the dark atmosphere framed by the window, and her face caught at it in silent recognition. She sat down a little to one side of us with her thin wrists crossed, her eyes still, reposeful and dark.
We did not know what we should say to her, she was so strange, so different from everything else, as she sat there in her black garments. It was as if the darkness, the unknown darkness outside which hid the future, had taken form and pressed in amongst us, grave and enigmatical.
“What’s your name?” someone asked.
“Cecilia.”
The name acted as a stimulus to our imagination. Cecilia, the organ song that rises through the struggling light of the church vaulting, upward, ever upward, strong as if it knew its goal, pure through the clarity of space, freezing under the chill of the stars. But what a strange Cecilia was this! What song did those eyes dream?
“And you go around alone on such an evening, Cecilia! Were you going anywhere?”
“No, nowhere. I like to feel the snow falling on me.”
“Were you born here, Cecilia?”
“No, I was born out there—we lived there then.” She stared into the distance, with raised eyebrows, and her tone gave us the impression that “out there” was some great, dark teeming city on the other side of the ocean, that it was deep with black memories, painfully intriguing to the thought. “But I’ve been here a long while,” she concluded.
She was so pretty with her reticent, dark manner; and her brief answers waked a trembling echo within one, like the commonplace but meaningful words in a dream. One could have sat there a long while asking questions at random and could have listened long.
But Leo grew impatient. He burned with zeal to get at his drawing, for that was why he had taken up with the girl, and he was not to be put off. He trusted in his art, did Leo; he was wont to talk of distilling the quintessence out of a physiognomy—and now he wished to do it with this subject. Just a few strokes and he would have it all in a concentrated effect: the tranquillity of chin and eyebrows, the falling line of the neck—the girl’s whole content should be noted there; but if so there must be no distraction, noemotions and associated thoughts to make one’s glance stray.
“Let her alone with your prattle,” he said; “she’s prettier when she is quiet.” And his eyes glanced with restless penetration, as if he was afraid of losing something, while he and the others chose their places.
She sat motionless; the whole proceeding appeared to be entirely indifferent to her and she continued to hold her wrists crossed and to gaze in front of her without seeing.
But we who did not draw felt that the silence was oppressive. Was not this unfair to her, was it not wrong to keep her there as a mere thing to be measured? Was not every glint of her eye, every ring in her voice worth more than all these lines? Was it not presumptuous to attempt to translate the changing deeps of life into the language of the deaf and dumb? What did she hide in the vault of her brain?—what was this girl that sat there?
The sketchers sweated and screwed up their eyes to make them sharp. They held up their hands against the light—they seemed to have a harder task than they had realized—and the girl slowly drooped her eyelashes.
With that we broke in, “You’re tired perhaps, Cecilia? It’s getting on toward bedtime.”
“I never sleep at night,” she answered, “I haven’t done it as long as I can remember.”
“But what do you do then? Are you up and about?”
“I think,” she said, and her eyes grew deep, as if night were there before her—“I lie and think and gaze out into the dark. It’s so silent then; sometimes I think that everybody is dead, and I, too. Itisso calm, the dark is so weightless and soft and pure.”
Her face had grown rigidly earnest; now it suddenly glowed with nervous life, as if a thought had burst into flames within it.
“But sometimes I can hear. There is someone walking in the street, far away; the stones ring under his feet, and he is coming nearer. First I think that there is only one, and I wonder who it can be. I dream that it’s for me that he is coming, but I don’t get up; I want him to lift me from just where I am, and take me to him without saying a word, and carry me far away. Then my heart begins to throb, and there’s a ringing in my ears, and I hear many steps, a whole flood of trampling and dancing which fills the street so completely that I think the house will fall over and be swept away, as when the river breaks up the dirty ice.
“And I’m so glad that I burst out laughing and stuff the blanket into my mouth so as not to beheard. Sometimes I hear myself sing, hear it actually, and lie and stretch out my arms; and the dark is no longer still, or black, it is like red whirlpools only. And I lie and wait, and know that it’s for me they are coming, and that they’ll lift me on high and rush forward. And I know how the sky will look: black, with great white lights. And the air will be cold and clear; it will all be as if it were at the bottom of the sea. Everything we pass falls to pieces behind us; there’s a sound of broken iron and a roaring and groaning of the earth, but we hasten forward, only forward; we do not turn our heads, we say nothing to each other, only scream with joy, as when it thunders.”
Her voice had a shrill and brittle ring, jubilant, but nearer to weeping than laughter. All at once she changed her tone.
“That’s the sort of thing I think at night,” she said wearily.
“But when do you sleep? You must surely sleep.”
She gave a clear, childish laugh.
“All day if I like. Mamma pulls up the curtains of course, but I can keep on lying. Then I can sleep, especially if there’s sunshine. One can dream so finely in the sunshine; one can laugh and run, and then it gets so warm, and when one gets up one is so deliciously tired!”
“But after that? Don’t you go to school, don’t you have any work?”
“Papa wants”—she uttered the first word with a peculiar intonation. “Papa (I don’t know whether he is my father,” she added indifferently) “wants me to go away; no matter where, he says. I went to school, but they didn’t suit me there. Now I’m left in peace. Mamma talks to them when they come after me; she has such a proud way with her, mamma has.”
“And what do your parents do?”
She looked up with a scornful dismissal of the subject and made no reply. Suddenly she laughed under her breath.
“Such a funny word!” she said. “It’s out of the catechism, isn’t it?”
“What word?”
“Parents. Oh, I know it means father and mother,” she drawled the words out to a comic length. “Mother is slender,” she continued, “but she’s beginning to get fat and lace herself. You ought to see her when she’s drunk soda water, oh, you just ought to see her! Her teeth aren’t as pretty any more either; she envies me mine.”
“And what does she want you to be?”
“It’s all the same”—her voice was cuttingly hard—“it’s all the same, whatever she wants; it’s all the same, what she says. I shan’t do it anyhow.”
It was easy to imagine her home after that; what was worse, it was easy, too, to imagine her future.
She seemed to have tired of being examined now, and turned around to one of the sketchers.
“Why do you paint girls?” she inquired of the corpulent Hans.
“Hm! Because they’re pretty.”
“Why don’t you paint war, or red clouds like those there?” She pointed to a landscape opposite her.
“Because I’ve never seen a war.”
“But red clouds you’ve seen surely. I’ve seen much handsomer ones than those; they don’t really burn.”
It was an impressionistic canvas; darkness creeping along the ground, darkness leaping up to meet one from the fields, and in the midst of the fading red off in the distance a lonely shivering poplar, the one thing that rose above the plain, cutting like a sword against the sky proudly and tragically. As the girl looked at it her pupils widened, contracted and widened and trembled; she had understood it at once, and her face became fixed by the sorrow of the picture.
“That’s beautiful,” she said. “Is it hard to learn to paint?”
“That depends. Can you draw?”
“I can’t do anything but play the piano.Mamma taught me that, but I can play better than she does, though we have no piano now.”
“Do you sing, then?”
“No, Ican’tsing”—her voice sounded more mournful than at any time before, almost despairing—“I can’t sing at all now.”
“Probably your voice is changing; you’ll have plenty of voice if you’ve had it before.”
“Oh, yes,” she replied impatiently; “it isn’t the voice I’m thinking of, but I can never sing any more.”
She raised her head slowly and regarded us all with a swift, deep, strangely searching look.
“What do you do that for?” we asked. “What are you looking for?”
“I’m looking at your eyes.” Her voice was childish, naïvely frank and so earnest!
“Do you often do so?”
“Yes, among strangers; then I don’t look at them any more.”
“And how have you found our eyes?”
“About like other peoples’. There is none of you who cansee.”
“How do you mean?”
“I can’t say any more, but there is no one that sees, really sees straight through you.”
“Hm! Maybe not. Have you met any such person?”
“No, never, but I keep on searching.”
“And if you should see such a person, what would you do?”
“Just wait, wait for the tide.”
“The tide you listen for at night?”
“Yes, for then it will come soon.”
“Finish me now,” she urged with a look at the sketchers. “Get done with your drawings.” And she sat as before.
But no one could draw in his usual style, no one was satisfied with his beginning. All were seeking for something, expressions changed, flaming with eagerness or drooping with fatigue. It seemed as if their thoughts tried to catch something fluttering, shifting, something that continually fled them.
Under these looks that were concentrated on her, together with the sharp yellow light, she grew dazzled, hypnotized, her mouth became tired, her eyes closed experimentally a couple of times, and then the lashes remained lowered and she went suddenly to sleep like a child, sinking back on the arm of the chair.
All had ceased drawing and had leaned forward with the same thought. What was she, this remarkable girl? Could all this be true?
Here she had come out of the dark, had come silently as the dark itself, enigmatical, disturbing as a dream, impossible to comprehend, impossible to lay hold of. Was she not just a vision,—notsprung from us, oh, no, but a vision of the slumbering darkness, the uncertain possibility, the great new chance that might come? But her breathing was audible, light and easy; her lean hands had the marks of the sempstress, her clothes were threadbare—an actual girl to be sure, with blood such as ours, a developing soul! What would ever become of her, what would become of her?
As if the question had been put in an audible voice, Jacques took it up, the silent Jacques who was wont to make an epigram out of every conviction and who filed every doubt to the point of a needle. But he now got up to speak, advancing toward the girl with his angular motions like those of a clasp-knife and his pointed head leaning forward.
“What will become of her? What will become of her?” he said; “that’s easy to guess.”
He bent down toward her, but so as not to overshadow her; his hand followed his words, but with light, caressing movements, as if he were touching an invalid. But on the floor his long shadow stood bowed against hers, and his gestures became pointed, sharp as thrusts, merciless, threatening to the slumberer in black.
“What will become of her—you who can wish but not will, you who wear away your time with comparing and feeling and looking, look here at what will become of her! First her mouth willbe transformed—her eyes, too, of course, but there the change won’t be permanent all at once; her eyes will go back and forward a long while and kindle and be quenched, but the mouth will retain inflexibly all that is strong enough to force in a wrinkle, to bend a line. The lips will come to shut harder when they are not opened by laughter. Here everything will be constricted together: the weariness of desire, the suffocation of kisses; hate which congeals into loathing, shame that is stifled; and then certitude will encompass them, the certitude that it must be so, that that is the whole.
“The cheek”—he almost touched it as it shone soft and pale in the light—“the cheek gets more sharply modeled, more set in contour, sinks in a little here, as when a flower petal withers. The forehead,—it will stay the same, only a line straight across as if an invisible knife had cut into the brain and divided the thoughts; barred in some to pine away up here, and driven the others to wrestle in nakedness and confinement. The hair,—it will grow darker with age and disfiguring attention, it will droop here and lie like a weight. The eyebrows,—you see there is a bend between them, they sink here, which gives a suggestion of nervous sensibility, of vibrating thoughts; but this will become no longer noticeable when she opens her eyes, nothing will benoticeable then but their depth of weariness, their infinity of freezing chill.
“Imagine the color of the whole harder, more vivid; weigh down all that is heavy, make sharp all that is light and delicate, harden all that is strong, banish joy with a cuff and blushes with a sneer, and there you have her, that is what will become of her. Pretty, eh! prettier than now because she’ll be even more effective to draw, eh?”
He stood silent a while and looked at her, his shadow trembling. Then he went on:
“That’s what she’ll come to be, and that, too, is all that such as we have the right to think of. But what shemightbe, ah! what she might be. If someone could take her as she lies there and dreams, take her and carry her far away and lift her on high in his arms. We keep on talking about art here, about what we intend and what the time is dreaming of. If there is anyone that has the same dreams that she has and the strength to will them, if there is anyone who’s a man, she is his. And what might not become of them both!”
He looked about him at us others who sat bending forward, gazing with hypnotized looks at the white gleaming countenance of the girl. At his last words we started half up; it was as if we waited that some one should come, that some one should grip us by the hair and hurl us forward,should lift us to where space was bright around us. Something should come to birth in us, sharp as a steel blade, unbending, unsullied, the blue sword of our will and life should be created among us, true life with warm soil and the sun that impels to growth. In the heat of the room we felt it already glowing in us by anticipation, cheeks and foreheads were red, a warm current of blood set in, there were white sparks in the eyes, and a shiver trembled along the spine.
Thereupon the girl awoke, as if roused by the clamor of all these thoughts as they beat their wings and struck together. First her eyes stared in fright, and then she laughed.
We all sunk back again.
“I didn’t know where I was,” she said.
“Oh, you weren’t afraid of us, were you?” inquired Jacques. “You saw that there was no one dangerous here.”
“Oh, no, I surely wasn’t afraid.” She laughed more merrily still. “No, there’s no one dangerous here. But I must have been asleep a long while. I must go now.”
We all offered to go with her, but she looked straight at us.
“Why?” she asked, “is the outside door locked?”
“No, not yet. But the street, the dark, the snow!”
“Oh, only that! But I went out alone. No, no, nobody needs to go along with me. I know my way.”
Nobody thought of opposing her, her voice was so remarkably firm; almost scornful, we thought.
We lighted her to the door and saw her small feet step quickly on the yellow lamplight, which grew paler along the tile floor and was broken by the light on the stairway.
When she was half out of sight we called for the last time, “You’ll come again, won’t you?”
She turned her head. From under the ugly old hat her eyes looked out at us, deep and sombre.
“No,” she said, “I shan’t come again. Why should I?”
She was gone, and we all rushed forward to the window, opened it and leaned out, stretching ourselves over the sill. She had not got down yet. Before us lay the black bulks of the houses, defiantly heavy and motionless to our gaze. Here and there was a faint yellow gleam from a street lamp; one could see some large, loose flakes glide through it. The air was gray, swarmingly alive with darkness and a little farther out across the roofs the church tower stood with its shining dials against the black horizon.
Then she came out of the house door; we could hear her steps resound up to where we werethrough the chilly air. We followed the little black, indistinct figure out to the corner, where the lamplight took hold of it and threw it out into tawny, pale relief. With that she was gone, vanished into the blackness, into the snow and night and threatening uncertainty from which she had come.
We fastened the window and sat down. In order to do something we tried to discuss, as we were used to, about art and its future. We talked about symbolism and syntheticism, but it all seemed less worth while now than before, and from time to time a speaker would stop in the midst of his period in order to examine a line in the half-finished portrait of Cecilia, and then give it up in despair.
And there was no warmth in the discussion, only dry and ill-tempered sallies that cut now at one man’s, now at another’s hobby and caused them to bolt off into the inane, where comprehension ceases. Soon we were all silent.