"You are perfectly inimitable," he said. "I love your serious, vivid nonsense. That you are an egoist is quite, quite true. But how much better an artist you would be if you weren't. What you want is deepening. You don't like the deeps, you know. You haven't got any. You don't like what you don't understand; that very simple little affair last night, for instance, frightened you."
Egoists are invariably truthful--according to their lights--about themselves. Evelyn was truthful now.
"Yes, that is so," he said. "I don't pretend to wish to seek out the secrets of the stars. But I know what I like. And I don't like anything that leads into the heart of things. I don't like interiors and symbolism. There is quite enough symbol for me on the surface. What I mean is that the eyebrow itself, the curve of the mouth, will tell you quite as much as one has any use for about the brain that makes the eyebrow frown or the mouth smile. Beauty may be skin deep only, but it is quite deep enough. Skin deep! Why, it is as deep as the sea!"
"Do you know, you are an interesting survival of the Pagan spirit?" he said at length.
"Erect me an altar then at once, and crown me with roses," he remarked. "But what have I said just now that makes you think that?"
"Nothing particular this moment," he answered, "though your remarking that beauty was enough for you is thoroughly Greek in its way. No; what struck me was that never have I seen in you the smallest rudiment or embryo of a conscience or of any moral sense."
Evelyn looked up with real interest at this criticism.
"Oh, that is perfectly true," he said. "Certainly I never have remorse; it must be awful, a sort of moral toothache. All the same, I don't steal or lie, you know."
"Merely because lying and stealing are very inartistic performances," said Tom. "But no idea of morality stands in your way."
Evelyn got up, looking out over the heat-hazed green of the woods below them with his brilliant glance.
"Is that very shocking?" he asked, with perfectly unassumed _naïvetê_.
"I suppose it is. Personally, I am never shocked at anything. But it seems to me very dangerous. You ought to wear a semaphore with a red lamp burning at the end of it."
Evelyn half shut his eyes and put his head on one side.