"Is your honeymoon to be Italian?" asked Artois.
"Whatever Hermione likes," answered Delarey. "I--it doesn't matter to me.
Wherever it is will be the same to me."
"Happiness makes every land an Italy, eh?" said Artois. "I expect that's
profoundly true."
"Don't you--don't you know?" ventured Delarey.
"I! My friend, one cannot be proficient in every branch of knowledge."
He spoke the words without bitterness, with a calm that had in it
something more sad than bitterness. It struck both Hermione and Delarey
as almost monstrous that anybody with whom they were connected should be
feeling coldly unhappy at this moment. Life presented itself to them in a
glorious radiance of sunshine, in a passionate light, in a torrent of
color. Their knowledge of life's uncertainties was rocked asleep by their
dual sensation of personal joy, and they felt as if every one ought to be
as happy as they were, almost as if every one could be as happy as they
were.
"Emile," said Hermione, led by this feeling, "you can't mean to say that
you have never known the happiness that makes of every place--Clapham,
Lippe-Detmold, a West African swamp, a Siberian convict settlement--an
Italy? You have had a wonderful life. You have worked, you have wandered,
had your ambition and your freedom--"
"But my eyes have been always wide open," he interrupted, "wide open on
life watching the manifestations of life."
"Haven't you ever been able to shut them for a minute to everything but
your own happiness? Oh, it's selfish, I know, but it does one good,
Emile, any amount of good, to be selfish like that now and then. It
reconciles one so splendidly to existence. It's like a spring cleaning of
the soul. And then, I think, when one opens one's eyes again one
sees--one must see--everything more rightly, not dressed up in frippery,
not horribly naked either, but truly, accurately, neither overlooking
graces nor dwelling on distortions. D'you understand what I mean? Perhaps
I don't put it well, but--"
"I do understand," he said. "There's truth in what you say."
"Yes, isn't there?" said Delarey.
His eyes were fixed on Hermione with an intense eagerness of admiration
and love.
Suddenly Artois felt immensely old, as he sometimes felt when he saw
children playing with frantic happiness at mud-pies or snowballing. A
desire, which his true self condemned, came to him to use his
intellectual powers cruelly, and he yielded to it, forgetting the benign
spirit which had paid him a moment's visit and vanished almost ere it had
arrived.