"I don’t know anything about its being a virtue; but it is a consolation."
As I stood looking down on her she said, softly:
"You’ve been a brick, Vio: you’ve been a heroine. The only difference I should note between you and the people to whom I’m going back is that you’ve suppressed your condemnation, and they didn’t feel it."
"I can’t tell you what they knew, for the reason that it wouldn’t have mattered. They knew there was something wrong with me, that I was hiding something, that I was probably an outcast of good family; but they gave me a great, big affection to live in, and thought no more about it. You’ve given me—"
There was an extraordinarily brilliant flash of her dark eyes as she lifted them to mine.
"What?" she interjected. "Have you any idea of what I’ve given you?"
"You’ve given me," I repeated, "the great, big affection to live in, but with something in it that poisoned the air. I’m grateful to you, Vio, more grateful than I can begin to tell you, especially as I know now what you’ve been thinking all the time; but you can easily understand that I prefer not to live in an atmosphere laden with—"
"If we purified that, the atmosphere? What then?"
"It still wouldn’t be everything. When I say I don’t like the life, it isn’t just because it’s cast me out; it’s because for me—mind you, I’m not speaking of any one else—it’s become vapid and—and foolish, and—and a throwing away of time."
"And what do you find among the people you—you call your friends that’s more worth while?"
"That’s what it’s hard to tell you. I find the simple and elemental, something basic and fundamental that the new crisis in existence is telling us to discover and—and rectify. You remember what I said a month or more ago to Stroud, that our building was collapsing?"
"Yes; and I hoped you were, as people say, talking through your hat."
"Well, I wasn’t. The building is coming down, right to the foundations. Only the foundations will remain."
"They’re awfully crude foundations, aren’t they?"
"Exactly. That’s just where the trouble is. The bases of our life are ugly and unclean, and so we’ve turned away and refused to look at them. I’m going back, Vio, to see what I can do to make them less ugly, less unclean, and more secure to build on. How _can_ we erect a society on foundations that already have the element of decay in them before we’ve added the first layer of our superstructure?"