“Are you getting ready to tell me now that an American never really gets to know any French people?” said Starwick, repeating the banal phrase with a quiet sarcasm that brought a flush to the other’s face.
“Well, it’s not likely that he will, from what I’ve heard.”
Starwick cast a weary look around him at the chattering group of people at the other tables.
“God!” he said quietly. “I shouldn’t think he’d want to. I imagine most of them are about as dull a lot as you could find.”
“If you feel that way about them, what is the great attraction Paris holds for you? How can you possibly feel that way about the people and still say you feel at home here?”
“Because Paris belongs to the world—to Europe—more than it belongs to France. One does not come here because he wants to know the French: he comes because he can find here the most pleasant, graceful and civilized life on earth.”
“Yes, but there are other things that may be more important than leading a graceful and pleasant life.”
“What, for instance?” said Starwick, looking at him.
“Getting your work done is one of them. For you, I should think that would be a great deal more important.”
Starwick was again silent; the old bestial grimace, image of an unutterable anguish and confusion in his soul, for a moment contorted his pleasant ruddy face, developed, passed, was gone; he said quietly and with the infinite weariness of despair that had now become the image of his life:
“Getting my work done! My God! as if it mattered.”
“There was a time when you thought it did, Frank.”
“Yes, there was a time when I did think so,” he said lifelessly.
“And now you no longer feel that way about it?”
Starwick was silent; when he spoke again, it was not to answer directly.
—“Always the old unquiet heart,” he said wearily and sadly; he turned and looked silently at his friend for a moment. “Why? Since I first knew you, you have been like that, Eugene—wanting to devour the earth, lashing your soul to frenzy in this useless, hopeless and impossible search for knowledge.”
“Why useless or hopeless, Frank?”
“Because it is a kind of madness in you that grows worse all the time; because you cannot cure it or ever satisfy this hunger of yours while you
