Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/425

 Joyce was not only an Arranger—she was a Loyalist. Like most American cosmopolites she revered the English peerage, adopted all their standards and beliefs—or what she considered their standards and beliefs—and treasured her encounters with them. Three and a half years after the War of 1914–18, she still said that she loathed all Germans, and the one complete quarrel between her and Martin occurred when he desired to see the laboratories in Berlin and Vienna.

But for all their differences it was a romantic pilgrimage. They loved fearlessly; they tramped through the mountains and came back to revel in vast bathrooms and ingenious dinners; they idled before cafés, and save when he fell silent as he remembered how much Leora had wanted to sit before cafés in France, they showed each other all the eagernesses of their minds.

Europe, her Europe, which she had always known and loved, Joyce offered to him on generous hands, and he who had ever been sensitive to warm colors and fine gestures—when he was not frenzied with work—was grateful to her and boyish with wonder. He believed that he was learning to take life easily and beautifully; he criticized Terry Wickett (but only to himself) for provincialism; and so in a golden leisure they came, back to America and prohibition and politicians charging to protect the Steel Trust from the communists, to conversation about bridge and motors and to osmotic pressure determinations.