you consider that we're languid?"--that form of rejoinder she had
jumped at for the sake of its pretty lightness. "Do you consider that
we are careless of mankind?--living as we do in the biggest crowd in the
world, and running about always pursued and pursuing."

It had made him think indeed a little longer than she had meant; but he
came up again, as she might have said, smiling. "Well, I don't know. We
get nothing but the fun, do we?"

"No," she had hastened to declare; "we certainly get nothing but the
fun."

"We do it all," he had remarked, "so beautifully."

"We do it all so beautifully." She hadn't denied this for a moment. "I
see what you mean."

"Well, I mean too," he had gone on, "that we haven't, no doubt, enough,
the sense of difficulty."

"Enough? Enough for what?"

"Enough not to be selfish."

"I don't think YOU are selfish," she had returned--and had managed not
to wail it.

"I don't say that it's me particularly--or that it's you or Charlotte or
Amerigo. But we're selfish together--we move as a selfish mass. You see
we want always the same thing," he had gone on--"and that holds us, that
binds us, together. We want each other," he had further explained; "only
wanting it, each time, FOR each other. That's what I call the happy
spell; but it's also, a little, possibly, the immorality."

"'The immorality'?" she had pleasantly echoed.

"Well, we're tremendously moral for ourselves--that is for each other;
and I won't pretend that I know exactly at whose particular personal
expense you and I, for instance, are happy. What it comes to, I daresay,
is that there's something haunting--as if it were a bit uncanny--in
such a consciousness of our general comfort and privilege. Unless
indeed," he had rambled on, "it's only I to whom, fantastically, it says
so much. That's all I mean, at any rate--that it's sort of soothing;
as if we were sitting about on divans, with pigtails, smoking opium and
seeing visions. 'Let us then be up and doing'--what is it Longfellow
says? That seems sometimes to ring out; like the police breaking
in--into our opium den--to give us a shake. But the beauty of it is, at
the same time, that we ARE doing; we're doing, that is, after all, what
we went in for. We're working it, our life, our chance, whatever you may
call it, as we saw it, as we felt it, from the first. We HAVE worked
it, and what more can you do than that? It's a good deal for me," he
had wound up, "to have made C