“I should like to meet literary people,” said Andrew wistfully, “but I suppose I never shall.”
“Oh, yes, you will, and you won’t find them any more interesting than your Fifeshire fisher folk. Epigrams pall upon you when they form the staple commodity of conversation. The somewhat dingy journalist, who has a trick of smart talking and who poses to himself as everything he is not, is just as great a bore as the respectable city clerk who lives at Hornsey and expatiates upon its advantages. You must not mistake cleverness for genius. The one is often merely the result of environment and atmosphere. The other nearly always appears in unlikely and seemingly impossible places. You know what Swinburne says: ‘There is only one thing we may reverence, and that is genius. There is only one thing we may worship, and that is goodness.’”
“It seems to me,” said Andrew thoughtfully, “that you reverse it. You reverence goodness and worship genius!”
“Perhaps I do, certainly and perhaps fortunately, the one is much rarer than the other. The best things in life are the commonest. There are flowers, and children, and love, and friendship for everybody, if they will have them.”
“You, turning pessimist, _Padre mio_! This will never do. You are too serious--far too serious. I prescribe a course of Anthony Hope immediately. I have the ‘Dolly Dialogues’ with me, and you must force yourself to appreciate them. It’s plain you have met with little real tragedy in your life, or you would be more cheerful.”
“Have you a tragic past, that you are always gay?”
Mary shivered, but she did not answer. She called to Wiggins to come out of the water, for it was growing cold.
The minister scourged himself for four hours afterward, for he noticed that she was pale, and that there were shadows under her brown eyes. What had he said?
Mary had gone to play golf at St. Andrews. The minister called on Mrs. Urquhart anent some parish matters and she detained him, rather against his will, to talk of Mary and her perfections. She never spoke of her except as “My Miss Mary,” and it was apt to bewilder the uninitiated. Suddenly she asked the minister:
“Does she ever talk to you of the wee girlie who was killed?”
“Eh, it was just an awful thing. Sit down, Mr. Methven, and I’ll tell you.”