“I know, darling,” she said with a gentle and tolerant sarcasm. “You and Bernard Shaw: if he said baled hay was good for you, you’d believe him, wouldn’t you?”
He laughed in his soundless, enthusiastic and beautifully generous way, his gaunt starved face lighting up with the gleeful, almost diabolically brilliant radiance of his wonderful selfless good-nature.
Then, turning swiftly to his firmer manner of incisive severity—the direct and earnest concision with which he whispered his instructions—he said abruptly:
“And look, Gene… when you finish eating put the lights out: the switch is on the right hand by the door as you go out…. And stay up as long as you like, go wherever you like, do as you please—you’ll bother no one,” he whispered, “… and a good walk,” he continued abruptly after a moment’s pause, “—is down the road—the way you went with Ros’tonight—except that you keep on—”
“Past the cows, darling,” said Rosalind gently. “Past all the lovely cows and barns and meadows of the moon.”
LXII
The two young people stopped talking instantly as Eugene came in, Joel got up and shut the door behind him, indicated an easy leather chair, where the author could read his play most comfortably, and sitting down again beside his sister, waited for the play to begin.
Eugene began to read haltingly, with the difficulty and embarrassed constraint of a young man just beginning to test his powers, exhibiting his talents to the public for the first time, and torn by all the anguish, hope, and fear, the proud incertitude of youth.
It was a play called “Mannerhouse,” a title which itself might reveal the whole nature of his error—and its subject was the decline and fall and ultimate extinction of a proud old family of the Southern aristocracy in the years that followed the Civil War, the ultimate decay of all its fortunes and the final acquisition of its proud estate, the grand old columned house that gave the play its name, by a vulgar, coarse and mean, but immensely able member of the rising “lower class.”
This theme—which, in its general form and implications, was probably influenced a good deal by The Cherry Orchard of Chekhov—was written in a somewhat mixed mood of romantic sentiment, Byronic irony, and sardonic realism. The hero was a rather Byronic character, a fellow who concealed his dark and tender poetry under the mask
