upward in the moonlight air like filings of light steel. Turning to the young man beside her, she addressed him with the somewhat patient and dutiful kindliness of a person receiving a strange guest in her home for the first time.
“Well,” she said, “and how did you find the trip up? Did Joel frighten you out of your wits by his driving? He does everyone else.”
“Well, he did go pretty fast,” the youth admitted. “He had me hanging on once or twice—when we left the main road we took the curve on two wheels, but he seemed to know what he was doing.”
“I assure you,” said Mrs. Pierce, with a stern laugh, “that he does not. I wish I could share your confidence, but I can’t. I don’t think he has the faintest notion what he’s doing.”
“But, after all,” the very quiet, pleasant, almost toneless voice of a young man whose name was George Thornton now took up the thread of the discussion—“after all, I should think that any reasonable man would be content with a speed of thirty-five or forty miles an hour. After all,” he said very quietly again, “perhaps the most important things in life are not to be got at through speed—perhaps all the things that are most worth living for are not to be had if we always go a mile a minute.”
“That’s just it, George!” Mrs. Pierce put in with decisive satisfaction. “That’s just it! Any reasonable man would be content with thirty-five or forty miles an hour—but Joel is not reasonable. When he gets in a car he’s like a child that’s been given a new toy to play with for the first time.”
“The greatest things in life, the highest values,” George Thornton went on in his quiet, pleasant, almost toneless voice, which now, despite the air of telling reasonableness with which he spoke—the air of temperance, moderation and control—was, somehow, indefinably tinged by a sombre fatality: the tone of a man whose extreme reasonableness comes from a fear of madness, whose temperance from some fatal impulse to insane excess—“the greatest things in life,” he went on in his quiet, toneless voice, almost as if he were talking to himself and had not heard what Mrs. Pierce had said—“are not to be got from machinery or speed, or any material object in the world whatever…. Christ,” he continued with his quiet, utterly reasonable, and implacable finality, “said that the greatest thing in life is love. Buddha said that the greatest thing in life is the illumination of the human spirit. Socrates found that man’s highest duty was obedience to his country’s laws. And Confucius,
