Page laughed, appreciating her hit. "Oh, I mean Turk as a generic term." Sylvia, circling warily about the contestants, looking for a chance to make her presence felt, without impairing the masculine gusto with which they were monopolizing the center of the stage, tossed in a suggestion, "Was it Hawthorne's--it's a queer fancy like Hawthorne's--the idea of the miser, don't you remember, whose joy was to roll naked in his gold pieces?" Page snatched up with a delighted laugh the metaphor she had laid in his hand. "Capital! Precisely! There's the thing in a nutshell. We twentieth century Midases have got beyond the simple taste of that founder of the family for the shining yellow qualities of money, but we love to wallow in it none the less. We like to put our feet on it, in the shape of rugs valued according to their cost, we like to eat it in insipid, out-of-season fruit and vegetables." "Doesn't it occur to you," broke in Morrison, "that you may be attacking something that's a mere phase, an incident of transition?" "Is anything ever anything else!" Page broke in to say. Morrison continued, with a slight frown at the interruption, "America is simply emerging from the frontier condition of bareness, and it is only natural that one, or perhaps two generations must be sacrificed in order to attain a smooth mastery of an existence charged and enriched with possession." He gave the effect of quoting a paragraph from one of his lectures. "Isn't the end of that 'transition,'" inquired Page, "usually simply that after one or two generations people grow dulled to everything _but_ possession and fancy themselves worthily occupied when they spend their lives regulating and caring for their possessions. I hate," he cried with sudden intensity, "I hate the very sound of the word!" "Does you great credit, I'm sure," said Morrison, with a faint irony, a hidden acrimony, pricking, for an instant, an ugly ear through his genial manner. Ever since the day of the fire, since Page had become a more and more frequent visitor in Lydford and had seen more and more of Sylvia, she had derived a certain amount of decidedly bad-tasting amusement from the fact of Morrison's animosity to the other man. But this was going too far. She said instantly, "Do you know, I've just thought what it is you all remind me of--I mean Lydford, and the beautiful clothes, and nobody bothering about anything but tea and ideas and knowing the right people. I knew it made me think of something else, and now I know--it's a Henry James novel!" Page took up her lead instantly, and said gravely, putting himself beside her as another outsider: "Well, of course, that's their ideal. That's what they _try_ to be like--at least to talk like James people. But it's not always easy. The vocabulary is so limited." "Limited!" cried Mrs. Marshall-Smith. "There are more words in a Henry James novel than in any dictionary!"