Page nodded.  “Yes, that’s what they all say nowadays.  Personal immortality is as out of fashion as big sleeves.”

“Do you believe it?” asked Sylvia, seeing the talk take an intimate turn, “or are you like me, and don’t know at all what you do believe?” If she had under this pseudo-philosophical question a veiled purpose analogous to that of the less subtle charmer whose avowed expedient is to get “a man to talk about himself” the manoeuver was eminently successful.

“I’ve never had the least chance to think about it,” he said, sitting up, “because I’ve always been so damnably beset by the facts of living.  I know I am not the first of my race to feel convinced that his own problems are the most complicated, but ...”

“Yours!” cried Sylvia, genuinely astonished.

“And one of the hardships of my position,” he told her at once with a playful bitterness, “is that everybody refuses to believe in the seriousness of it.  Because my father, after making a great many bad guesses as to the possible value of mining stock in Nevada, happened to make a series of good guesses about the value of mining stock in Colorado, it is assumed that all questions are settled for me, that I can joyously cultivate my garden, securely intrenched in the certainty that this is the best possible of all possible worlds,”

“Oh yes—­labor unions—­socialism—­I.W.W.,” Sylvia murmured vaguely, unable, in spite of her intelligence, to refrain from marking, by a subsidence of interest, her instinctive feeling that those distant questions could not in the nature of things be compared to present, personal complications.

“No—­no—!” he protested.  “That’s no go!  I’ve tried for five years now to shove it out of sight on some one of those shelves.  I’ve learned all the arguments on both sides.  I can discuss on both sides of those names as glibly as any other modern quibbler.  I can prove the rights of all those labels or I can prove the wrongs of them, according to the way my dinner is digesting.  What stays right there, what I never can digest (if you’ll pardon an inelegant simile that’s just occurred to me), a lump I never can either swallow entirely down or get up out of my throat, is the fact that there are men, hundreds of men, thousands of men, working with picks underground all day, every day, all their lives, and that part of their labor goes to provide me with the wherewithal to cultivate my taste, to pose as a patron of the arts, to endow promising pianists—­to go through all the motions suitable to that position to which it has pleased Providence to call me.  It sticks in my crop that my only connection with the entire business was to give myself the trouble to be born my father’s son.”

“But you do work!” protested Sylvia.  “You work on your farm here.  You run all sorts of lumbering operations in this region.  The first time I saw you, you certainly looked less like the traditional idea of a predatory coal-operator.”  She laughed at the recollection.