"You'd better study the part of _Lola_--learn the lines," said he, when he had finished his reflecting."Then--this day week at the same hour--we will begin.We will work all afternoon--we will dine together--go to some theater where Ican illustrate what I mean.Beginning with next Wednesday that will be the program every day until further notice.""Until you see whether you can do anything with me or not?""Just so.You are living with Spenser?"
"Yes." Susan could have wished his tone less matter-of-fact.
"How is he getting on?"
"He and Sperry are doing a play for Fitzalan.""Really? That's good.He has talent.If he'll learn of Sperry and talk less and work more, and steadily, he'll make a lot of money.You are not tied to him in any way?""No--not now that he's prospering.Except, of course, that I'm fond of him."He shrugged his shoulders."Oh, everybody must have somebody.
You've not seen this house.I'll show it to you, as we've still fifteen minutes."A luxurious house it was--filled with things curious and, some of them, beautiful--things gathered in excursions through Europe, Susan assumed.The only absolutely simple room was his bedroom, big and bare and so arranged that he could sleep practically out of doors.She saw servants--two men besides the butler, several women.But the house was a bachelor's house, with not a trace of feminine influence.And evidently he cared nothing about it but lived entirely in that wonderful world which so awed Susan--the world he had created within himself, the world of which she had alluring glimpses through his eyes, through his tones and gestures even.Small people strive to make, and do make, impression of themselves by laboring to show what they know and think.But the person of the larger kind makes no such effort.In everything Brent said and did and wore, in all his movements, gestures, expressions, there was the unmistakable hallmark of the man worth while.The social life has banished simplicity from even the most savage tribe.Indeed, savages, filled with superstitions, their every movement the result of some notion of proper ceremonial, are the most complex of all the human kind.The effort toward simplicity is not a movement back to nature, for there savage and lower animal are completely enslaved by custom and instinct; it is a movement upward toward the freedom of thought and action of which our best intelligence has given us a conception and for which it has given us a longing.Never had Susan met so simple a man; and never had she seen one so far from all the silly ostentations of rudeness, of unattractive dress, of eccentric or coarse speech wherewith the cheap sort of man strives to proclaim himself individual and free.
With her instinct for recognizing the best at first sight, Susan at once understood.And she was like one who has been stumbling about searching for the right road, and has it suddenly shown to him.She fairly darted along this right road.She was immediately busy, noting the mistakes in her own ideas of manners and dress, of good and bad taste.She realized how much she had to learn.But this did not discourage her.For she realized at the same time that she could learn--and his obvious belief in her as a possibility was most encouraging.
When he bade her good-by at the front door and it closed behind her, she was all at once so tired that it seemed to her she would then and there sink down through sheer fatigue and fall asleep.For no physical exercise so quickly and utterly exhausts as real brain exercise--thinking, studying, learning with all the concentrated intensity of a thoroughbred in the last quarter of the mile race.
