“Then, if he is behind the ugly things, too,” said Roger, “we must take him either way, so let us be glad of the beauty for its own sake.  Eskew says this is a wicked town.  It may be—­I don’t know.  He says it’s badly built; perhaps it is; but it doesn’t seem to me that it’s ugly in itself.  I don’t know what its real self is, because it wears so many aspects.  God keeps painting it all the time, and never shows me twice the same picture; not even two snowfalls are just alike, nor the days that follow them; no more than two misty sunsets are alike—­for the color and even the form of the town you call ugly are a matter of the season of the year and of the time of day and of the light and air.  The ugly town is like an endless gallery which you can walk through, from year-end to year-end, never seeing the same canvas twice, no matter how much you may want to—­and there’s the pathos of it.  Isn’t it the same with people with the characters of all of us, just as it is with our faces?  No face remains the same for two successive days—­”

“It don’t?” Colonel Flitcroft interrupted, with an explosive and rueful incredulity.  “Well, I’d like to—­” Second thoughts came to him almost immediately, and, as much out of gallantry as through discretion, fearing that he might be taken as thinking of one at home, he relapsed into silence.

Not so with the others.  It was as if a firecracker had been dropped into a sleeping poultry-yard.  Least of all could Mr. Arp contain himself.  At the top of his voice, necessarily, he agreed with Roger that faces changed, not only from day to day, and not only because of light and air and such things, but from hour to hour, and from minute to minute, through the hideous stimulus of hypocrisy.

The “argument” grew heated; half a dozen tidy quarrels arose; all the sages went at it fiercely, except Roger Tabor, who stole quietly away.  The aged men were enjoying themselves thoroughly, especially those who quarrelled.  Naturally, the frail bark of the topic which had been launched was whirled about by too many side-currents to remain long in sight, and soon became derelict, while the intellectual dolphins dove and tumbled in the depths.  At the end of twenty minutes Mr. Arp emerged upon the surface, and in his mouth was this: 

“Tell me, why ain’t the Church—­why ain’t the Church and the rest of the believers in a future life lookin’ for immortality at the other end of life, too?  If we’re immortal, we always have been; then why don’t they ever speculate on what we were before we were born?  It’s because they’re too blame selfish—­don’t care a flapdoodle about what was, all they want is to go on livin’ forever.”

Mr. Arp’s voice had risen to an acrid triumphancy, when it suddenly faltered, relapsed to a murmur, and then to a stricken silence, as a tall, fat man of overpowering aspect threw open the outer door near by and crossed the lobby to the clerk’s desk.  An awe fell upon the sages with this advent.  They were hushed, and after a movement in their chairs, with a strange effect of huddling, sat disconcerted and attentive, like school-boys at the entrance of the master.