'I am a realist,' said Mr. Edmund Lushington, as if that explained
everything. 'We could hardly expect to agree,' he added.
It sounded very much as if he had said: 'As you are not a realist, my
poor young lady, I can of course hardly expect you to know anything.'
Margaret Donne looked at him quietly and smiled. She was not very
sensitive to other people's opinions; few idealists are, for they
generally think more of their ideas than of themselves. Mr. Lushington
had said that he could not agree with her, that was all, and she was
quite indifferent. She had known that he would not share her opinion,
when the discussion had begun, for he never did, and she was glad of
it. She also knew that her smile irritated him, for he did not resemble
her in the very least. He was slightly aggressive, as shy persons often
are: and yet, like a good many men who profess 'realism,' brutal
frankness and a sweeping disbelief of everything not 'scientifically'
true, Mr. Lushington was almost morbidly sensitive to the opinion of
others. Criticism hurt him; indifference wounded him to the quick;
ridicule made him writhe.
He was a fair man with a healthy skin, and his eyes were blue; but they
had a particularly disagreeable trick of looking at one suddenly for an
instant, with a little pinching of the lids, and a slight glitter,
turning away again in a displeased way, as if he had expected to be
insulted, and was sure that the speaker was slighting him, at the very
least. He often blushed when he said something sharp. He wished he were
dark, because dark men could say biting things without blushing, and
pale, because he felt that it was not interesting to be pink and white.
His hair, too, was smoother and softer than he could have wished it. He
had tried experiments with his beard and moustache, and had finally
made up his mind to let both grow, but he still looked hopelessly neat.
When he pushed his hair back from his forehead with a devastating
gesture it simply became untidy, as if he had forgotten to brush it. At
last he had accepted his fate, and he resigned himself to what he
considered his physical disadvantages, but no one would ever know how
he had studied the photographs of the big men in the front of things,
trying to detect in them some single feature to which his own bore a
faint resemblance. Hitherto he had failed.
Yet he was 'somebody,' and perhaps it means more to be somebody
nowadays, in the howling fight for place and acknowledgment, than it
meant in the latter part of the nineteenth century. How easy life was
in the early eighties, compared with this, how mild were the ways of
nations, how primitive, pure and upright the dealings of financiers in
that day of pristine virtue and pastoral simplicity! It was all very
well to be an idealist then, Mr. Lushington sometimes said to Margaret;
the world was young, then; there was time for everything, then; there
was room for everybody, then; even the seasons were different, then! At
least, all old people say so, and it can hardly be supposed that all
persons over fifty years of age belong to a secret and powerful
association of liars, organised and banded together to deceive the
young.