Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/57

 The end of the cigarette was glowing, little coils of fire in the tiny particles of tobacco; he blew out the match and the smile disappeared from his face with its ruddy illumination, and he tossed the charred stick into his coffee cup.

Were there, then, two opinions? Was it possible that any one doubted? When anarchists were in question! Still, on that kindly face before me there lingered the shadow of that strange expression, inscrutable, perplexing, piquing curiosity. And yet by some strange, almost clairvoyant process, it had gradually acquired the effect of a persistent, irresistible and implacable authority, in the presence of which one felt—well, cheap, as though there were secrets from which one had been excluded, as though there were somewhere in this universe a stupendous joke which alone of all others one lacked the wit to see. It gave one a disturbed, uneasy sensation, a mauvaise honte.

The innate sense of personal dignity, the instinct to retire into one's self, the affectation of repose and self-sufficiency which leads one lightly to wave aside a subject one does not understand, to pass it over for other and more familiar topics—these were ineffectual. Curiosity perhaps in a sense much less refined than that in which Matthew Arnold considered it when he exalted it to the plane of the higher virtues, broke down reticence, and, at last I asked, and even begged my companion to tell me what he meant. But he was implacable; he had reached, it appeared, a stage of development in which the opinions of others were of no consequence; an alti