"Is that speech an attack upon American freedom?" asked the professor, laughing a little. "I believe Mr. Griggs is an American."
"No, indeed. Why should I attack American freedom?" said John.
"American freedom is not so easily attacked," I remarked. "It eludes definition and rejects political paradox. No one ever connects our republic with the fashionable liberty-fraternity-and-equality doctrines of European emancipation; still less with the communistic idea that, although men have very different capacities for originating things, all men have an equal right to destroy them."
"Griggs is mounted upon his hobby," remarked John Carvel, stretching his feet out towards the fire. The professor turned the light of his spectacles upon me, and puffed a cloud of smoke.
"Are you a political enthusiast and a rider of hobby-horses, Mr. Griggs?" he asked.
"Pardon me. I think you know very well," said the professor. "I should say you belonged to a class of persons who know very well what they think."
"That is, of all questions a man can ask, the most difficult to answer. How do you judge of anything?"
"By applying the test of past experience to present fact," I replied.
"Then past experience is that by which I judge. How can you expect me to tell you the whole of my past experience, in order that you may understand how my judgment is formed? It would take years."
"You are a pair of very singular men," remarked John Carvel. "You seem to take to argument as fish to the water. You ought to be successful in a school of walking philosophers."
John seemed more depressed than I had ever seen him, and only made an observation from time to time, as though to make a show of hospitality. The professor interested me, but I could see that we were boring Carvel. The conversation languished, and before long the latter proposed that we should go into the drawing-room for half an hour before bed-time.
We found the ladies seated around the fire. Their voices fell suddenly as we entered the room, and all of them looked towards John and the professor, as though expecting something. It struck me that they had been talking of some matter which was not intended for our ears.
"We have been making plans for Christmas," said Mrs. Carvel, as though to break the awkward silence that followed our entrance.