Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/246

234 'That is my sister,' the other said, smiling and rising, 'who is calling me. They are going down. Good-day, gentlemen.'

They both saluted, and stood watching her as she crossed the clearing and disappeared through the underwood by a path on the opposite side.

'Didn't I tell you,' said Randal, 'that the perpetual arrival of new events saves us? That girl's grimace over the cross and the inscription has put me into a good humour. And she went precisely in the nick of time. There was nothing in her—nothing, nothing! Three more minutes, and our plummets would have been rattling on the shallow bottom of her poor little soul, and she would have left us disconsolate. Now we shall both of us talk with an animated inconsistency (and that means talk well), and when you are next by yourself you'll be able to think about her for a quarter of an hour or so, and exaggerate her possibilities. Very likely she was a Dane, or a Swede, or a Norwegian, and that permits you to look upon her as a problematical heroine of Ibsen's. Your vice of thinking things out will take you even so far as that.'

Wilson was silent a moment. Then he said:

'How truly, in the actual application of his theory of life, is your temper identical with Beyle's! Beyle, of course, is a Liberal—a French Liberal of 1830;