“Not ‘dream,’” said Gumbril, putting down the glass from which he had been profoundly drinking. “You can’t possibly say ‘dream,’ you know.”
“Why do you interrupt me?” Lypiatt turned on him angrily. His wide mouth twitched at the corners, his whole long face worked with excitement. “Why don’t you let me finish?” He allowed his hand, which had hung awkwardly in the air above him, suspended, as it were, at the top of a gesture, to sink slowly to the table. “Imbecile!” he said, and once more picked up his knife and fork.
“But really,” Gumbril insisted, “you can’t say ‘dream.’ Can you now, seriously?” He had drunk the best part of a bottle of Burgundy and he felt good-humoured, obstinate and a little bellicose.
“And why not?” Lypiatt asked.
“Oh, because one simply can’t.” Gumbril leaned back in his chair, smiled and caressed his drooping blond moustache. “Not in this year of grace, nineteen twenty-two.”
“But why?” Lypiatt repeated, with exasperation.
“Because it’s altogether too late in the day,” declared precious Mr. Mercaptan, rushing up to his emphasis with flutes and roaring, like a true Conquistador, to fall back, however, at the end of the sentence rather ignominiously into a breathless confusion. He was a sleek, comfortable young man with smooth brown hair parted in the centre and conducted in a pair of flowing curves across the temples, to be looped in damp curls behind his ears. His face ought to have been rather more exquisite, rather more refinedly dix-huitième than it actually was. It had a rather gross, snouty look, which was sadly out of harmony with Mr. Mercaptan’s inimitably graceful style. For Mr. Mercaptan had a style and used it, delightfully, in his middle articles for the literary weeklies. His most precious work, however, was that little volume of essays, prose poems, vignettes and paradoxes, in which he had so brilliantly illustrated his favourite theme—the pettiness, the simian limitations, the insignificance and the absurd pretentiousness of Homo soi-disant Sapiens. Those who met Mr. Mercaptan personally often came away with the feeling that perhaps, after all, he was right in judging so severely of humanity.
“Too late in the day,” he repeated. “Times have changed. Sunt lacrymæ rerum, nos et mutamur in illis.” He laughed his own applause.
“Quot homines, tot disputandum est,” said Gumbril, taking another sip of his Beaune Supérieure. At the moment, he was all for Mercaptan.
“But why is it too late?” Lypiatt insisted.