“All I’m saying is that your campaign of aesthetic education hasn’t made the matter vital enough to people, to any people, not even to people who call themselves vastly aesthetic, so that they give time and effort and self-schooling to the acquisition of beauty.  They not only want their money to do their dirty work for them, they try to make it do their fine living for them too, with a minimum of effort on their part.  They want to buy beauty, outright, with cash, and have it stay put, where they can get their fingers on it at any time, without bothering about it in the meantime.  That’s the way a Turk likes his women—­same impulse exactly,”

“I’ve known a few Caucasians too ...,” Mrs. Marshall-Smith contributed a barbed point of malice to the talk.

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.