Auf wiedersehen!"
XIII.
March went away thinking of what Lindau had said, but not for the
impersonal significance of his words so much as for the light they cast
upon Lindau himself. He thought the words violent enough, but in
connection with what he remembered of the cheery, poetic, hopeful
idealist, they were even more curious than lamentable. In his own life of
comfortable reverie he had never heard any one talk so before, but he had
read something of the kind now and then in blatant labor newspapers which
he had accidentally fallen in with, and once at a strikers' meeting he
had heard rich people denounced with the same frenzy. He had made his own
reflections upon the tastelessness of the rhetoric, and the obvious
buncombe of the motive, and he had not taken the matter seriously.
He could not doubt Lindau's sincerity, and he wondered how he came to
that way of thinking. From his experience of himself he accounted for a
prevailing literary quality in it; he decided it to be from Lindau's
reading and feeling rather than his reflection. That was the notion he
formed of some things he had met with in Ruskin to much the same effect;
he regarded them with amusement as the chimeras of a rhetorician run away
with by his phrases.
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