"Brent doesn't care for women--as women," said he."He never did.Don't you think he's queer?""He's different," replied Susan."He doesn't care much for people--to have them as intimates.I understand why.Love and friendship bore one--or fail one--and are unsatisfactory--and disturbing.But if one centers one's life about things--books, pictures, art, a career--why, one is never bored or betrayed.He has solved the secret of happiness, I think.""Do you think a woman could fall in love with him?" he asked, with an air of the accidental and casual.
"If you mean, could I fall in love with him," said she, "Ishould say no.I think it would either amuse or annoy him to find that a woman cared about him.""Amuse him most of all," said Palmer."He knows the ladies--that they love us men for what we can give them.""Did you ever hear of anyone, man or woman, who cared about a person who couldn't give them anything?"Freddie's laugh was admission that he thought her right."The way to get on in politics," observed he, "is to show men that it's to their best interest to support you.And that's the way to get on in everything else--including love."Susan knew that this was the truth about life, as it appeared to her also.But she could not divest herself of the human aversion to hearing the cold, practical truth.She wanted sugar coating on the pill, even though she knew the sugar made the medicine much less effective, often neutralized it altogether.Thus Palmer's brutally frank cynicism got upon her nerves, whereas Brent's equally frank cynicism attracted her because it was not brutal.Both men saw that life was a coarse practical joke.Palmer put the stress on the coarseness, Brent upon the humor.
Brent recommended and introduced to her a friend of his, a young French Jew named Gourdain, an architect on the way up to celebrity."You will like his ideas and he will like yours,"said Brent.
She had acquiesced in his insistent friendship for Palmer and her, but she had not lowered by an inch the barrier of her reserve toward him.His speech and actions at all times, whether Palmer was there or not; suggested that he respected the barrier, regarded it as even higher and thicker than it was.Nevertheless she felt that he really regarded the barrier as non-existent.She said:
"But I've never told you my ideas."
"I can guess what they are.Your surroundings will simply be an extension of your dress."She would not have let him see--she would not have admitted to herself--how profoundly the subtle compliment pleased her.
Because a man's or a woman's intimate personal taste is good it by no means follows that he or she will build or decorate or furnish a house well.In matters of taste, the greater does not necessarily include the less, nor does the less imply the greater.Perhaps Susan would have shown she did not deserve Brent's compliment, would have failed ignominiously in that first essay of hers, had she not found a Gourdain, sympathetic, able to put into the concrete the rather vague ideas she had evolved in her dreaming.An architect is like a milliner or a dressmaker.He supplies the model, product of his own individual taste.The person who employs him must remold that form into an expression of his own personality--for people who deliberately live in surroundings that are not part of themselves are on the same low level with those who utter only borrowed ideas.That is the object and the aim of civilization--to encourage and to compel each individual to be frankly himself--herself.That is the profound meaning of freedom.The world owes more to bad morals and to bad taste that are spontaneous than to all the docile conformity to the standards of morals and of taste, however good.Truth--which simply means an increase of harmony, a decrease of discord, between the internal man and his environment--truth is a product, usually a byproduct, of a ferment of action.
Gourdain--chiefly, no doubt, because Susan's beauty of face and figure and dress fascinated him--was more eager to bring out her individuality than to show off his own talents.He took endless pains with her, taught her the technical knowledge and vocabulary that would enable her to express herself, then carried out her ideas religiously."You are right, _mon ami_," said he to Brent."She is an orchid, and of a rare species.She has a glorious imagination, like a bird of paradise balancing itself into an azure sky, with every plume raining color and brilliancy.""Somewhat exaggerated," was Susan's pleased, laughing comment when Brent told her.
"Somewhat," said Brent."But my friend Gourdain is stark mad about women's dressing well.That lilac dress you had on yesterday did for him.He _was_ your servant; he _is_ your slave."Abruptly--for no apparent cause, as was often the case--Susan had that sickening sense of the unreality of her luxurious present, of being about to awaken in Vine Street with Etta--or in the filthy bed with old Mrs.Tucker.Absently she glanced down at her foot, holding it out as if for inspection.She saw Brent's look of amusement at her seeming vanity.
"I was looking to see if my shoes were leaky," she explained.
A subtle change came over his face.He understood instantly.
"Have you ever been--cold?" she asked, looking at him strangely.
"One cold February--cold and damp--I had no underclothes--and no overcoat.""And dirty beds--filthy rooms--filthy people?""A ten-cent lodging house with a tramp for bedfellow."They were looking at each other, with the perfect understanding and sympathy that can come only to two people of the same fiber who have braved the same storms.Each glanced hastily away.
