Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/33

Rh 'There it is. The thing's so perfect that it's open to as many interpretations as any other great work—a poem of Goethe, a dialogue of Plato, a symphony of Beethoven.'

'It simply stands quiet, you mean,' said Dane, 'and lets us call it names?'

'Yes, but all such loving ones. We're "staying" with some one—some delicious host or hostess who never shows,'

'It's liberty-hall—absolutely,' Dane assented.

'Yes—or a convalescent home.'

To this, however, Dane demurred. 'Ah, that, it seems to me, scarcely puts it. You weren't ill—were you? I'm very sure I really wasn't. I was only, as the world goes, too "beastly well"!'

The good Brother wondered. 'But if we couldn't keep it up?'

'We couldn't keep it down—that was all the matter!'

'I see—I see.' The good Brother sighed contentedly; after which he brought out again with kindly humour: 'It's a sort of kindergarten!'

'The next thing you'll be saying that we're babes at the breast!'

'Of some great mild, invisible mother who stretches away into space and whose lap is the whole valley?'

'And her bosom'—Dane completed the figure—'the noble eminence of our hill? That will do; anything will do that covers the essential fact.'

'And what do you call the essential fact?'

'Why, that—as in old days on Swiss lake-sides'—we're en pension.'

The good Brother took this gently up. 'I remember—I remember: seven francs a day without wine! But, alas, it's more than seven francs here.'

'Yes, it's considerably more,' Dane had to confess. 'Perhaps it isn't particularly cheap.'

'Yet should you call it particularly dear?' his friend after a moment inquired.