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Mrs. Blessingbourne weighed the objection. “Doesn’t it depend on what you mean by passion?”

“I think one can mean only one thing: the enemy to behavior. ”

“Oh, I can imagine passions that are, on the contrary, friends to it. ”

Her interlocutor thought. “Doesn’t it depend perhaps on what you mean by behavior?”

“Dear, no. Behavior is just behavior—the most definite thing in the world. ”

“Then what do you mean by the ‘interest’ you just now spoke of? The picture of that definite thing?”

“Yes—call it that. Women aren’t alwaysvicious, even when they’re—”

“When they’re what?” Voyt asked.

“When they’re unhappy. They can be unhappy and good. ”

“That one doesn’t for a moment deny. But can they be ‘good’ and interesting?”

“That must be Maud’s subject!” Mrs. Dyott explained. “To show a woman who is. I’m afraid, my dear,” she continued, “you could only show yourself. ”

“You’d show then the most beautiful specimen conceivable”—and Voyt addressed himself to Maud. “But doesn’t it prove that life is, against your contention, more interesting than art? Life you embellish and elevate; but art would find itself able to do nothing with you, and, on such impossible terms, would ruin you. ”

The color in her faint consciousness gave beauty to her stare. “‘Ruin’ me?”

“He means,” Mrs. Dyott again indicated, “that you would ruin ‘art. ”’

“Without, on the other hand”—Voyt seemed to assent—“its giving at all a coherent impression of you. ”

“She wants her romance cheap!” said Mrs. Dyott.

“Oh, no—I should be willing to pay for it. I don’t see why the romance—since you give it that name—should be all, as the French inveterately make it, for the women who are bad. ”

“Oh, they pay for it!” said Mrs. Dyott.

“Dothey?”

“So, at least”—Mrs. Dyott a little corrected herself—“one has gathered (for I don’t read your books, you know!) that they’re usually shown as doing. ”

Maud wondered, but looking at Voyt, “They’re shown often, no doubt, as paying for their badness. But are they shown as paying for their romance?”

“My dear lady,” said Voyt, “their romance istheir badness. There isn’t any other. It’s a hard law, if you will, and a strange, but goodness has to go without that luxury. Isn’t to begood just exactly, all round, to go without?” He put it before her kindly and clearly—regretfully too, as if he were sorry the truth should be so sad. He and she, his pleasant eyes seemed to say, would, had they had the making of it, have made it better. “One has heard it before—at least Ihave; one has heard your question put. But always, when put to
a mind not merely muddled, for an inevitable answer. ‘Why don’t you, cher monsieur, give us the drama of virtue?’ ‘Because, chère madame, the high privilege of virtue is precisely to avoid drama. ’ The adventures of the honest lady? The honest lady hasn’t—can’t possibly have—adventures. ”

Mrs. Blessingbourne only met his eyes at first, smiling with a certain intensity. “Doesn’t it depend a little on what you call adventures?”

“My poor Maud,” said Mrs. Dyott, as if in compassion for sophistry so simple, “adventures are just adventures. That’s all you can make of them!”

But her friend went on, for their companion, as if without hearing. “Doesn’t it depend a good deal on what you call drama?” Maud spoke as one who had already thought it out. “Doesn’t it depend on what you call romance?”

Her listener gave these arguments his very best attention. “Of course you may call things anything you like—speak of them as one thing and mean quite another. But why should it depend on anything? Behind these words we use—the adventure, the novel, the drama, the romance, the situation, in short, as we most comprehensively say—behind them all stands the same sharp fact that they all, in their different ways, represent. ”