“No bad news, I trust?” John Mayrant inquired.
I told him no; and presently we had resumed our seats in the quiet charm
of the flowers.
I now spoke with an intention. “What a lot you seem to have seen and
suffered of the advanced Newport!”
The intention wrought its due and immediate effect. “Yes. There was no
choice. I had gone to Newport upon--upon an urgent matter, which took me
among those people.”
He dwelt upon the pictures that came up in his mind. But he took me away
again from the “urgent matter.”
“I saw,” he resumed more briskly, “fifteen or twenty--most amazing,
sir!--young men, some of them not any older than I am, who had so many
millions that they could easily--” he paused, casting about for some
expression adequate--“could buy Kings Port and put it under a glass
case in a museum--my aunts and all--and never know it!” He livened with
disrespectful mirth over his own picture of his aunts, purchased by
millionaire steel or coal for the purposes of public edification.
“And a very good thing if they could be,” I declared.
He wondered a moment. “My aunts? Under a glass case?”
“Yes, indeed--and with all deference be it said! They’d be more
invaluable, more instructive, than the classics of a thousand
libraries.”
He was prepared not to be pleased. “May I ask to whom and for what?”
“Why, you ought to see! You’ve just been saying it yourself. They would
teach our bulging automobilists, our unlicked boy cubs, our
alcoholic girls who shout to waiters for ‘high-balls’ on country club
porches--they would teach these wallowing creatures, whose money has
merely gilded their bristles, what American refinement once was. The
manners we’ve lost, the decencies we’ve banished, the standards we’ve
lowered, their light is still flickering in this passing generation of
yours. It’s the last torch. That’s why I wish it could, somehow, pass on
the sacred fire.”
He shook his head. “They don’t want the sacred fire. They want the
high-balls--and they have money enough to be drunk straight through the
next world!” He was thoughtful. “They are the classics,” he added.