"I am sceptical," said Oldmeadow. "I am, if you like, satirical. I don't believe there are any alternatives to love-stories; only palliatives to disappointment."
Barney leaned forward: "Adrienne, you see, doesn't accept that old-fashioned, sentimentalizing division of the sexes. She doesn't accept the merely love-story, hearth-side rôle for women."
"Oh, well," Oldmeadow played with his fork, smiling with the wryness that accompanied his reluctant sincerities, "I don't divide the sexes as far as love-stories are concerned. We are all in the same boat. For us, too, Barney, it's love-story or palliative. You don't agree? If you were disappointed in love? Hunting? Farming? Politics? Post-Impressionism? Would any of them fill the gap?"
It wasn't at all the line he had intended the talk to take. He knew that as he glanced across at Nancy. Saying nothing, as if its subject could not concern her, and with a dim little smile, she listened, and he knew that for her, though she wouldn't die of it, there would be only palliatives. If only Barney, confound him, hadn't been so charming.
Barney did not know how to answer the last assault, and, boyishly, looked across at his beloved for succour. She gave it instantly.
"Sadness, sorrow, tragedy, even, isn't despair," she said. "Barney, I believe, if sorrow overtook him, would mould the rough clay of his occupation to some higher beauty than the beauty he'd lost. To lie down and die; to resign oneself to palliatives. Oh, no. That's not the destiny of the human soul."
"Roger's pulling your leg, Barney, as usual," Palgrave put in scornfully. He had been listening with his elbows on the table, his eyes on the table-cloth. "He knows as well as I do that there's only one love. The sort you're all talking about--the Theseus and Ariane affair--is merely an ebullition of youth and as soon as nature has perpetuated the species by means of it, it settles down, if there's any reality under the ebullition, to grow into the other--the divine love; the love of the soul for the Good, the True and the Beautiful," Palgrave declared, growing very red as he said it.
"Really--my dear child!" Mrs. Chadwick murmured. She had never heard such themes broached at her table and glanced nervously up at old Johnson to see if he had followed. "That is a very, very materialistic view!"