Nadine with the same sincerity had mapped out for herself a course of study at Meering, and she read Plato every afternoon in the original Greek, with an admirable translation at hand, from three o'clock till five. During these hours she was inaccessible, and when she emerged rather flushed sometimes from the difficulty of comprehending what some of the dialogues were about, she was slightly Socratic at tea, and tried to prove, as Dodo said, that the muse of Mr. Harry Lauder was the same as the muse of Sir George Alexander, and that she ought to be rude to Hugh if she loved him. She was extremely clear-headed in her reason, and referred them to the Symposium and the dialogue on Lysis, to prove her point. But as nobody thought of contradicting her, since the Socratic mood soon wore off, they did not attempt to find out the Hellenic equivalents for those amazing doctrines.
She was markedly Socratic this afternoon, when the whole party were having tea on the lawn. Esther and Bertie had been down to bathe after lunch, and since everybody was going to bathe again after tea, they had left their clothes behind different rocky screens above the probable high-water level on the beach, and were clad in bathing-dress, moderately dried in the sun, with dressing-gowns above. Berts had nothing in the shape of what is called foot-gear on his feet, since it was simpler to walk up barefoot, and he was wriggling his toes, one after the other, in order to divest them of an excess of sand.
"But pain and pleasure are so closely conjoined," said Nadine, in answer to an exclamation of his concerning stepping in a gorse-bush. "It hurts you to have a prickle in your foot, but the pleasure of taking it out compensates for the pain!"
"That's Socratic," said Hugh, "when they took off his chains just before they hemlocked him. You didn't think of that, Nadine."
"I didn't claim to, but it is quite true. There is actual pleasure in the cessation of pain. If you are unhappy and the cause of your unhappiness is removed, your happiness is largely derived from the fact that you were unhappy. For instance, did you ever have a fish-bone stick in your throat, Hugh?"
"As a matter of fact, never," said Hugh. "But as I am meant to say 'yes,' I will."
"And did you cough?"
"Violently," said Hugh.
"Upon which the fish-bone returned to your mouth?"
"No," said Hugh. "I swallowed it. It never returned at all."
"It does not matter which way it went," said Nadine; "but your feeling of pleasure at its going was dependent on the pain which its sticking gave you."
"Is that all?" said Hugh.
"Does it not seem to you to be proved?"
"Oh, yes. It was proved long ago. But it's a pedantic point. The sort of point John would have made."
He absently whistled the first two lines of "Am Stillen Herd," and Nadine was diverted from her Platonisms.
"Ah, that is so much finer than the finished 'Preislied,'" she said; "he has curled and oiled his verse like an Assyrian bull. He and Sachs had cobbled at it too much: they had brushed and combed it. It had lost something of springtime and sea-breeze. A finished work of art has necessarily less quality of suggestiveness. Look at the Leonardo drawings. Is the 'Gioconda' ever quite as suggestive? I am rather glad it was stolen. I think Leonardo is greater without it."
John drew in his breath in a pained manner.
"'Mona Lisa' was the whole wonder of the world," he said. "I had sooner the thief had taken away the moon. Do you remember – perhaps you didn't notice it – the painting of the circle of rock in which she sat?"
"You are going to quote Pater," said Nadine. "Pray do not: it is a deplorable passage, and though it has lost nothing by repetition – for there was nothing to lose – it shows an awful ignorance of the spirit of the Renaissance. The eyelids are not a little weary: they are a little out of drawing only."
Esther looked across at Berts.
"Berts is either out of drawing," she said, "or else his dressing-gown is. I think both are: he is a little too long, and also the dressing-gown is too short. They ought to proceed as far as the ankles, but Berts' got a little weary at his knees."
"I barked my knees on those foul rocks," said Berts, examining those injured joints.
"Barking them is worse than biting them," said Nadine.
"I never bite my knees," said he. "It is a greedy habit. Worse than doing it to your nails."
"If you are not careful you will talk nonsense," said Nadine.
"I don't agree. If you are not careful you can't talk nonsense. If you want to talk nonsense, you've not got to be not careful."
"There are too many 'nots,'" remarked Nadine.
"Not at all. If you are careless some sort of idea creeps into what you say, and it ceases to be nonsense. There are lots of creeping ideas about like microbes, any of which spoil it. Hardly anybody can be really meaningless for five minutes. That is why the Mad Tea Party is a supreme work of art: you can't attach the slightest sense to anything that is said in it."
"The question is what you mean by nonsense," said Nadine. "Is it what Mr. Bernard Shaw writes in his plays, or what Mrs. Humphry Ward writes in her books? They neither mean anything but they are not at all alike. In fact they are as completely opposed to each other as sense is to nonsense."
Berts threw himself back on the turf.
"True," he said. "But they are neither of them nonsense. The lame and the halt and the blind ideas creep into both. They both talk sense mortally wounded."
Esther gave her appreciative sigh.
"Oh, Berts, how true!" she said. "I went to a play by Mrs. Humphry Ward the other day, or else I read a book by Bernard Shaw, I forget which, and all the time I kept trying to see what the sense of it had been before it had its throat cut. But no one ever tried to see what Alice in Wonderland meant, or what Aunt Dodo means."
"Mama is wonderful," said Nadine. "She lives up to what she says, too. Her whole life has been complete nonsense. I do hope Jack will persuade her to do the most ridiculous thing of all, and marry him."
"Is that why he is coming?" asked Esther.
"Oh, I hope so. It would be the greatest and most absurd romance of the century."
Hugh was eating sugar meditatively out of the sugar basin.
"I don't see that you have any right to lay down the law about nonsense, Nadine," he said. "You are constantly reading Plato, and making arguments, which are meant to be consecutive."
"I do that to relax my mind," said Nadine. "Berts is quite right. Nonsense is not the absence of sense, but the negative of sense, just as sugar is the negative of salt. To get non-salt with your egg, you must eat sugar with it, not only abstain from salt."
"You will get a remarkably nasty taste," remarked John.
"Dear John, nobody ever wronged you so much as to suggest that you would like nonsense. When was Leonardo born? And how old was he when he died? And how many golden crowns did Francis of France give him for the 'Gioconda'? Your mind is full of interesting facts. That is why you are so tedious. You are like the sand they used to put on letters, which instantly made it dry."
Berts got up.
"We