"Do you smoke?" Kent asked, offering Frank a cigar and lighting one himself. "I cannot educate the people here to the idea of a smoking parson," he went on, "though it is quite a general thing in cities."
It was just the using of other men's deeds and thoughts that marked him as insincere. The appropriation of their vices to excuse his own, and, though he had not analyzed it, Harvey felt that the man had better have said: "I smoke because I want to smoke," or "I smoke because I do not feel that there is any wrong in it," and, in truth, Kent would have expressed himself correctly had he said either of these, but it was his misfortune to be lacking in expressing his convictions properly, to convey their real truth, and thus he was constantly creating a harmful and an untrue impression of himself.
The young men readily dropped into an easy talk of the place and people with which they were surrounded, yet Harvey's knowledge of these things was so limited, and Kent seemed so reluctant to talk of the world outside his own, that they eventually drifted, by easy stages, to a discussion of the contest that had drawn them together in a kind of mutual interest.
"It will be either a colossal failure or the most successful novelty that I have ever seen," said Kent. "But, somehow, Miss Virgie has a way of carrying her plans to a successful issue, and you cannot help but feel a confidence that the results will be all that she predicts."
"If your people are any way susceptible to novelty the idea must succeed," Harvey replied, "for she will sway them irresistibly."
"Did you ever know a woman to possess the magnetism that she has? Women are naturally attractive, but it seems always in a small degree. Their scope is usually limited to a smaller field, say their home circle, or perhaps a circle that includes their relatives and a few friends, but for them to accomplish anything, that is, so far as humanity is concerned, is quite an unusual thing," said Kent, the subject leading him on to other observations.
"I agree with you, but only partially," Harvey replied. "It may be true that a woman's influence is confined to a very small circle usually, as you say, but I hold that it is scarcely less potent because of its limitations."
"It was with the results as achieved by men that I was drawing the comparison. What proportion of feminine achievements against those masculine have we? Is the percentage not a very insignificant one?"
"I am afraid that you lose sight of the fact that whatever man accomplishes is taken up and cried about, while with women the reverse is true. They exert an influence that lacks publicity, for it rather seeks retirement, and is lost in the home circle of which you speak, while it may be that theirs was the head that planned and carried to a successful issue the very achievement their masculine relative or friend receives the credit for, which easily accounts for the uneven percentage."
"Yet is it not true that women give less than they receive?" Kent asked.
"In a material sense, yes; but of the things that we cannot measure, because they are without a fixed valuation, there is a decided credit on her side," said Harvey.
"Supposing, now," said Kent, "that the man loves as intensely as the woman at the outset. Don't you know that the time will always come when love will be toned by worldly or other affairs into a milder form, and then he seeks to make of its object a companion. What happens then? He is brought face to face with the fact that he is no longer equal to the occasions of her intensest moods; he cannot meet her fascinations with the understanding he once knew, and in the effort to atone for that failure he turns to material things as the next most suitable offering. That they are accepted goes without saying; for there was never yet a woman who, in lieu of homage, would not accept and feel these homelier things desirable. It may be, since homage and material offerings are so inseparable in the average case, that she cannot detect the division between them, and, taking one for both, she craves and accepts, yet still craves, always increasing her demands until, as I have said, she receives more than she gives."
"I am sorry that I cannot agree with you there," said Harvey, "at least in the motive that underlies the result. I am afraid that, in the order of circumstances, you have failed to grasp the exchange between the two, as it lies hidden beneath the achievements of the man, and yet is most often evidenced in his achievements. Of course we make offerings, and why should we not? We, as men, have these things to give. But let us suppose what would for many reasons be impossible; still we can suppose the case. Let us suppose that we be left a race of men only, and, in the interchange of ideas among ourselves, is it not highly probable that long before we became extinct we would have lost the effect of what is oftenest termed the 'refining influence,' and in the competition for each other's possessions an unholy rivalry would soon exist which, in the absence of that better influence, would degrade us. This competition would only be the first step on a downward track, until our one generation would surely find us indulging our aboriginal instincts, ambitionless, careless, thoughtless at its end. We would be everything we are not now, and just for lack of the guidance, the watchfulness and the care our women have given us. Surely we should be satisfied to share these better results with them."
"It is a rather sentimental view that you have of it," Kent laughed. "I can hardly reach that point where I can take all the glory of a man's achievements and, ruthlessly stripping him of their credit, pass them over to his feminine inspirators, parceling out this to his mother, that to his sister, and others to his wife."
"No more can I," Harvey replied earnestly. "But the fact that men reach known heights so much oftener than do women does not lead me to believe that only men are successful in their aims."
"Perhaps you are right," said Kent. The view was a new one to him, and, while he could not be counted as narrow-minded, his thirty years had not given the clearness of vision that Harvey possessed. He was more the man to accept things as they seem, rather than analyzing them from a diametrically opposite starting point. Yet he was impressionable, and quickly accepted Harvey's reasoning, because it seemed original in its method and forceful in its application and results. "I had never looked at it from just that point," the parson said.
"Two people hardly ever do take life and its affairs the same way," Frank replied good-naturedly, "and the chances for wrong conclusions are limitless. I am always finding myself in error just because an impression has started me on the wrong track."
"Well, there is some hope for the man who will see and acknowledge that he is wrong. Don't you think there is?"
"Indeed I do," Frank laughed. "So we can each continue hopeful, I think."
"I don't know," Kent said seriously. "I make so many mistakes, and, when they come back to me, of course I try to correct them."
"And are you not successful?"
"Sometimes, but, while I am busy with them, I go on making others."
"An endless chain," Harvey laughed.
"That is near it," Kent replied.
"I fear you are quite hopeless then," Harvey said, and both men laughed, partly at their own frank confessions, but more because each felt called upon to accept the other unseriously. Their mirth soon waned, as their minds would not relinquish the subject where their conversation had ended, and in its continuation there was much to reflect upon.
Men seldom if ever attempt to read their fellowmen by physiognomy, as women often do. A man may be aware that his neighbor has an unusually square jaw, but he only looks at it as being different from the ordinary jaw. He does not say, "Now, that fellow has a square jaw, so he is a prize-fighter with a bull-dog disposition," for he knows that there are persons in other occupations with jaws that indicate tenacity, while there are fighters without this particular kind of jaw, and since he has never noticed the kind of ear a musician has, or the eyes of a poet, in fact any of the features of people whose disposition or inclinations are daily before him, he does not judge by these things. At times this seeming lack of knowledge comes to him with regret, and he resolves on the spot that, at the first opportunity, he will take secret lessons from some of his feminine friends, whom he has heard reading character like so much print. It is a resolve in keeping with the feeling that he will some day read up on art, because someone has in his presence been talking art to someone else, and he could not understand; or he sees a lightning calculator doing wonderful sums for a gaping crowd, and in that expertness he finds his own mathematics very rusty by comparison, which occasions another resolve: "He will go and become expert—not just now, but very soon, and after all he does none of these things. The reason he does not is because they are out of the line of his daily needs. He could not use the knowledge if he had it, so these far-separated occasions only serve as reminders of the things in which he is lacking, though they are by no means essential.
Royal Kent would have given much to have been a physiognomist at the conclusion of his talk with Harvey, for he could derive nothing of the character of his guest from that talk unless it be his positiveness. He unconsciously depended on others, more or less, for the expressing of his thoughts. He never took so positive a stand that he could not modify it to another's views if the occasion demanded, for he disliked argument for argument's sake, or, for that matter, for any result it might obtain. He was all at sea as to the best way to proceed with Harvey, since his first observation had brought such an unusual amount of opposition at the outset. The fact is that the best way with most men is their own way, but Kent did not have the confidence in himself to act naturally, at least when he felt the equality or supremacy of another's mind, and in consequence his manner in all such circumstances was an uncomfortable one for his auditor. The knowledge of things in general was in him and easily discernible, but his withholding it from you, as he followed and agreed to your line of thought, gave the impression that he was weak, and perhaps he was, though you might still cling to him in a hope of obtaining that which he had—that which you knew he contained, but which he could not produce.
Harvey found the keenest delight in the study of character. And here now he had happened upon a character study that claimed his deepest interest. He discovered the free and easy social code upon which Kent was built, and the impossibility of its successful application to the calling he had chosen was at once apparent. The manner in which Kent toadied to the ideas of his guest amused Harvey because of its palpableness, and in Kent's unique character he found much that was fascinating.
"Then I shall see you at service in the morning?" Kent asked, as Frank rose to go.
"Indeed you will,' he replied. "I am very much interested in the outcome of your nutting contest, and I shall be there to watch the hold it takes on your people."
"Well, come early; I should like to have a little talk with you before service; 10.30 we begin. Come earlier if you can."
"I will be among the first," Frank replied.