Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/397

 inadequate as they seemed from the outside, they might be the first step towards understanding the truth—the truth for him.

To begin with, he hadn't in the least found out what men wanted or why they wanted it—all his classification had been like pressing wild-flowers and sticking them in a herbarium with the right Latin name tacked on—it cleared up some of the clutter, perhaps, but it left you mighty far from understanding life. All that he had learned from his classification was that men wanted a lot of contradictory things, and what one man would sell his soul to get, would break another one's heart to have. Well, wasn't that perhaps a clue? Wasn't it just that innate diversity which was at the root of a great many tragedies? Wasn't the trouble that men wouldn't let themselves act as individuals? Men were so hopelessly tied to the fashion of their century. Yes, men were fashion-ridden: they had no call to laugh at women's continuous-performance-vaudeville of big-sleeves, tight-lacing, hobble-skirts! Women cared about clothes, and every woman except a few dowds was out to look like every other woman, and just a little more so; men cared about the business of the world, and every man except a few freaks felt that he ought to outdo every one else at whatever all the men of his time were doing. And nobody wanted to be a freak. But the truth was that there were all sorts of men in the world all the time—who ought normally to do all sorts of different things. But did they? No, they didn't. No matter what you really wanted to do with your life, no matter what your particular life was best suited for, human tradition was always inflexibly insisting that you try to cut your life by the pattern considered fashionable at the time and in the place where you lived—try to be an Emperor in Imperial Rome, try to be a millionaire in twentieth century New York. People didn't seem able to consider even for a moment that there must be lots of men so made that they would prefer anything to the process of becoming an Emperor or a millionaire.

There rose before Neale now the restless, unhappy face of the young Frenchman he had come to know in Bourges, who one evening as they sat in the park near the Cathedral,