“Yes,” said Tom, “I understand what you mean very well, Tony. Christian is very incautious--undignified--it is difficult to express what I mean. Something is lacking in him--what people call equilibrium, mental poise. On the one hand, he does not know how to keep his countenance when other people make naïve or tactless remarks--he does not understand how to cover it up, and he just loses his self-possession altogether. But the same thing happens when he begins to be garrulous himself, in the unpleasant way he has, and tells his most intimate thoughts. It gives one such an uncanny feeling--it is just the way people speak in a fever, isn’t it? Self-control and personal reserve are both lacking in the same way. Oh, the thing is quite simple: Christian busies himself too much with himself, with what goes on in his own insides. Sometimes he has a regular mania for bringing out the deepest and the pettiest of these experiences--things a reasonable man does not trouble himself about or even want to know about, for the simple reason that he would not like to tell them to any one else. There is such a lack of modesty in so much communicativeness. You see, Tony, anybody, except Christian, may say that he loves the theatre. But he would say it in a different tone, more _en passant_, more modestly, in short. Christian says it in a tone that says: ‘Is not my passion for the stage something very marvellous and interesting?’ He struggles, he behaves as if he were really wrestling to express something supremely delicate and difficult.” “I’ll tell you,” he went on after a pause, throwing his cigarette through the wrought-iron lattice into the stove: “I have thought a great deal about this curious and useless self-preoccupation, because I had once an inclination to it myself. But I observed that it made me unsteady, hare-brained, and incapable--and control, equilibrium, is, at least for me, the important thing. There will always be men who are justified in this interest in themselves, this detailed observation of their own emotions; poets who can express with clarity and beauty their privileged inner life, and thereby enrich the emotional world of other people. But the likes of us are simple merchants, my child; our self-observations are decidedly inconsiderable. We can sometimes go so far as to say that the sound of orchestra instruments gives us unspeakable pleasure, and that we sometimes do not dare try to swallow--but it would be much better, deuce take it, if we sat down and accomplished something, as our fathers did before us.” “Yes, Tom, you express my views exactly. When I think of the airs those Hagenströms put on--oh, Heavens, what truck! Mother doesn’t like the words I use, but I find they are the only right ones. Do you suppose they think they are the only good family in town? I have to laugh, you know; I really do.” CHAPTER III