“Oh, people weary me so!” she said. “They’re so impossible most of the time and so sublimely unaware of that fact! I’ve just come from seeing an elderly woman who said that she might be interested in helping us. She was fat and expensively gowned and she wanted to know whether we wouldn’t print a story about the historical old families of this city and how they had founded a great, commercial and romantic fabric. I told her that we were concerned with the restless and flaming present, with the artists and thinkers of our own time, and not with respectable tradespeople of the past. Of course I put it as nicely as I could but she flew into a temper and said I was insulting the people who had built up a great and mighty city.... O people are so impossible!” Carl envied the excited flow of her words and wished that he could also feverishly felicitate his emptiness at that particular moment. “I felt like telling her that men who’ve made money and put up ugly buildings aren’t necessarily important enough to talk about,” said Helen, with a hollow seriousness, “but of course I didn’t for fear of hurting Mart’s chances.” “I get so tired of wasting words on people who lead monotonous lives and can’t see the variety and beauty within life,” said Martha. “When you talk to them they treat you as though you were a little, misbehaving girl who would soon be spanked and put to bed. ‘O you’ll soon get over all of this artistic nonsense,’ they say.” “Ah, they can’t see that a defiance like yours, Mart, is a fire that only grows stronger when someone tries to put it out,” said Helen with a spontaneously rhetorical worship. Carl grinned at the dramatic sincerity with which these two women lunged at colossal targets. “What’s all of this endless stuff about beauty?” he asked. “Beauty, beauty, I’m tired of the label. No specific description but just a nice, sonorous word. You might exalt your loves and punish your aversions with a little more clarity.” “O you can’t diagram it as though it were a problem in mathematics!” cried Martha. “It’s too big and mysterious for that. You simply know it when you see it. It quickens your breath and drops like music upon your soul. It’s the thing that makes you know that you have a soul--the radiant weariness that springs from everything that is strong, and lonely, and delicate, and elusive, and tortured.” “The adjectives are stirring and the fact that they happen to be meaningless is of little importance,” said Carl. “I like the way in which you make love to your emotions.” Martha gave a grimace of exasperation. “You’re the most insincere man I know,” she said. “Some day I’ll fall in love with a man who can be sincerely brilliant and beautiful and who doesn’t put his words together carefully, as though they were unimportant toys.” “Such a fate may be exactly what you deserve,” said Carl, still grinning.