“Ah, that’s the trouble. We’re all far too complex nowadays.”
“We live in a complex age,” I returned profoundly.
“True, very true,” he replied, and twisted the ribbon of his eyeglass round one finger. “Very little is left that is simple and primitive and beautiful.”
I favoured him with the cosmic shrug of his cult, and said nothing eloquently. The understanding was complete.
Cicely Vicars’s “evening” was ground I had not hitherto explored, and I had marked for my own at once the young man drooping mincingly over the piano. He was smooth and fair, inclined to premature stoutness, and looked remotely. Mrs. Vicars informed me that he was a playwright, a dramatic critic, and a Fashion; that he promised brilliant things, and that the name under which he wrought was Eleanor Macquoid. She added that he had intuition beyond his years.
Now people went to Mrs. Vicars’s “evening” for intellectual intercourse and the exchange of ideas--an object in which they would not be balked. Carrie had said as much to me.
“You ought to come, Rol,” she had remarked on one occasion. “It’s so--it’s awfully new, Rol, really.”
“Indeed?” I had said. “In what way is it particularly--pardon me--up to date?”
“Oh,” she replied, “it’s so _real_, Rollo.” Then, reassuringly, “They don’t talk about the soul, you know--you needn’t be afraid of that. It’s--it’s instinct. The soul is quite too old, you know.”
“A full season behind,” I assented gravely. “And so the soul, _chez_ Mrs. Vicars, is superseded in favour of the dilettante animal? Is that so, my sister?”
“Yes,” she agreed doubtfully, and added, “Of course there are outsiders.”
It turned out, as Caroline had said, to be Instinct, Primal Sanity, and the Elemental Paganism, and very prettily put I heard it. No one was _blasé_. They said so. They were enthusiastic. My young man declared it with an animation that brought him near to spilling the liqueur carefully poised on his knee. He spoke of the keen joy of living, delicately and epigrammatically, digressing to observe that he preferred Indian cigarettes to Brazilian, and adding that after all there was nothing like the great rough kindnesses of the Mother Earth. Cicely Vicars’s gathering was indisputably in the vanguard of the latest cry.