Mr. Mercaptan shook his head. “Too Wellsian,” he said. “Too horribly Utopian. They’d be ludicrously out of place in my boudoir. And besides, my sofa is well enough sprung already, thank you.”
“But what about Tolstoy?” shouted Lypiatt, letting out his impatience in a violent blast.
Mr. Mercaptan waved his hand. “Russian,” he said, “Russian.”
“And Michelangelo?”
“Alberti,” said Gumbril, very seriously, giving them all a piece of his father’s mind—“Alberti was much the better architect, I assure you.”
“And pretentiousness for pretentiousness,” said Mr. Mercaptan, “I prefer old Borromini and the baroque.”
“What about Beethoven?” went on Lypiatt. “What about Blake? Where do they come in under your scheme of things?”
Mr. Mercaptan shrugged his shoulders. “They stay in the hall,” he said. “I don’t let them into the boudoir.”
“You disgust me,” said Lypiatt, with rising indignation, and making wider gestures. “You disgust me—you and your odious little sham eighteenth-century civilization; your piddling little poetry; your art for art’s sake instead of for God’s sake; your nauseating little copulations without love or passion; your hoggish materialism; your bestial indifference to all that’s unhappy and your yelping hatred of all that’s great.”
“Charming, charming,” murmured Mr. Mercaptan, who was pouring oil on his salad.