eginning with next Wednesday
that will be the program every day until further notice."
"Until you see whether you can do anything with me or not?"
"Just so. You are living with Spenser?"
"Yes." Susan could have wished his tone less matter-of-fact.
"How is he getting on?"
"He and Sperry are doing a play for Fitzalan."
"Really? That's good. He has talent. If he'll learn of
Sperry and talk less and work more, and steadily, he'll make
a lot of money. You are not tied to him in any way?"
"No--not now that he's prospering. Except, of course, that
I'm fond of him."
He shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, everybody must have somebody.
You've not seen this house. I'll show it to you, as we've
still fifteen minutes."
A luxurious house it was--filled with things curious and, some
of them, beautiful--things gathered in excursions through
Europe, Susan assumed. The only absolutely simple room was
his bedroom, big and bare and so arranged that he could sleep
practically out of doors. She saw servants--two men besides
the butler, several women. But the house was a bachelor's
house, with not a trace of feminine influence. And evidently
he cared nothing about it but lived entirely in that wonderful
world which so awed Susan--the world he had created within
himself, the world of which she had alluring glimpses through
his eyes, through his tones and gestures even. Small people
strive to make, and do make, impression of themselves by
laboring to show what they know and think. But the person of
the larger kind makes no such effort. In everything Brent
said and did and wore, in all his movements, gestures,
expressions, there was the unmistakable hallmark of the man
worth while. The social life has banished simplicity from
even the most savage tribe. Indeed, savages, filled with
superstitions, their every movement the result of some notion
of proper ceremonial, are the most complex of all the human
kind. The effort toward simplicity is not a movement back to
nature, for there savage and lower animal are completely
enslaved by custom and instinct; it is a movement upward
toward the freedom of thought and action of which our best
intelligence has given us a conception and for which it has
given us a longing. Never had Susan met so simple a man; and
never had she seen one so far from all the silly ostentations
of rudeness, of unattractive dress, of eccentric or coarse
speech wherewith the cheap sort of man st
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