Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/32

24 'But everything is. Isn't that just why we're here?'

'Just exactly,' Dane said; 'only I've been living in the beguiled supposition that we've somehow or other a climate.'

'So have I; so, I dare say, has every one. Isn't that the blessed moral?—that we live in beguiled suppositions. They come so easily here, and nothing contradicts them.' The good Brother looked placidly forth—Dane could identify his phase. 'A climate doesn't consist in its never raining, does it?'

'No, I dare say not. But somehow the good I've got has been half the great, easy absence of all that friction of which the question of weather mostly forms a part—has been indeed largely the great, easy, perpetual air-bath.'

'Ah, yes—that's not a delusion; but perhaps the sense comes a little from our breathing an emptier medium. There are fewer things in it! Leave people alone, at all events, and the air is what they take to. Into the closed and the stuffy they have to be driven. I've had, too,—I think we must all have,—a fond sense of the south.'

'But imagine it,' said Dane, laughing, 'in the beloved British islands and so near as we are to Bradford!'

His friend was ready enough to imagine. 'To Bradford?' he asked, quite unperturbed. 'How near?'

Dane's gaiety grew. 'Oh, it doesn't matter!'

His friend, quite unmystified, accepted it. 'There are things to puzzle out—otherwise it would be dull. It seems to me one can puzzle them.'

'It's because we're so well disposed,' Dane said.

'Precisely—we find good in everything.'

'In everything,' Dane went on. 'The conditions settle that—they determine us.'

They resumed their stroll, which evidently represented on the good Brother's part infinite agreement. 'Aren't they probably in fact very simple?' he presently inquired. 'Isn't simplification the secret?'

'Yes, but applied with a tact!'