It began to dawn on Sylvia that, under his air of whimsical self-mockery he was talking to her seriously.  She tried to adjust herself to this, to be sympathetic, earnest; though she was still smarting with the sense of having appeared to herself as undignified and ridiculous.

“And besides that,” he went on, looking away, down the dusty highroad they were then crossing on their way back to the house—­“besides that, I went back on a great scheme of Morrison’s for a National Academy of Aesthetic Instruction, which I was to finance and he to organize.  He had gone into all the details.  He had shown wonderful capacity.  It’s really very magnanimous of him not to bear me more of a grudge.  He thought that giving it up was one of my half-baked ideas.  And it was.  As far as anything I’ve accomplished since, I might as well have been furthering the appreciation of Etruscan vases in the Middle West.  But then, I don’t think he’ll miss it now.  If he still has a fancy for it, he can do it with Molly’s money.  She has plenty.  But I don’t believe he will.  It has occurred to me lately (it’s an idea that’s been growing on me about everybody) that Morrison, like most of us, has been miscast.  He doesn’t really care a continental about the aesthetic salvation of the country.  It’s only the contagion of the American craze for connecting everything with social betterment, tagging everything with that label, that ever made him think he did.  He’s far too thoroughgoing an aesthete himself.  What he was brought into the world for, was to appreciate, as nobody else can, all sorts of esoterically fine things.  Now that he’ll be able to gratify that taste, he’ll find his occupation in it.  Why shouldn’t he?  It’d be a hideously leveled world if everybody was, trying to be a reformer.  Besides, who’d be left to reform?  I love to contemplate a genuine, whole-souled appreciator like Morrison, without any qualms about the way society is put together.  And I envy him!  I envy him as blackly as your pines envied the sumac.  He’s got out of the wrong role into the right one.  I wish to the Lord I could!”

They were close to the house now, in the avenue of poplars, yellow as gold above them in the quick-falling autumn twilight.  Sylvia spoke with a quick, spirited sincerity, her momentary pique forgotten, her feeling rushing out generously to meet the man’s simple openness.  “Oh, that’s the problem for all of us!  To know what role to play!  If you think it hard for you who have only to choose—­how about the rest of us who must—?” She broke off.  “What’s that?  What’s that?”

She had almost stumbled over a man’s body, lying prone, half in the driveway, half on the close-clipped grass on the side; a well-dressed man, tall, thin, his limbs sprawled about broken-jointedly.  He lay on his back, his face glimmering white in the clear, dim dusk.  Sylvia recognized him with a cry.  “Oh, it’s Arnold!  He’s been struck by a car!  He’s dead!”