The Complete Man laughed. “A conscientious hedonist. I see.”
She felt uncomfortably that the fastidious lady had not quite lived up to her character. She had spoken more like a young woman who finds life too dull and daily, and would like to get on to the cinema. “I am very conscientious,” she said, making significant play with the magnolia petals and smiling her riddling smile. She must retrieve the Great Catherine’s reputation.
“I could see that from the first,” mocked the Complete Man with a triumphant insolence. “Conscience doth make cowards of us all.”
The fastidious lady only contemptuously smiled. “Have a little chocolate cake,” she suggested. Her heart was beating. She wondered, she wondered.
There was a long silence. Gumbril finished his chocolate cake, gloomily drank his tea and did not speak. He found, all at once, that he had nothing to say. His jovial confidence seemed, for the moment, to have deserted him. He was only the Mild and Melancholy one foolishly disguised as a Complete Man; a sheep in beaver’s clothing. He entrenched himself behind his formidable silence and waited; waited, at first, sitting in his chair, then, when this total inactivity became unbearable, striding about the room.
She looked at him, for all her air of serene composure, with a certain disquiet. What on earth was he up to now? What could he be thinking about? Frowning like that, he looked like a young Jupiter, bearded and burly (though not, she noticed, quite so burly as he had appeared in his overcoat) making ready to throw a thunderbolt. Perhaps he was thinking of her—suspecting her, seeing through the fastidious lady and feeling angry at her attempted deception. Or perhaps he was bored with her, perhaps he was wanting to go away. Well, let him go; she didn’t mind. Or perhaps he was just made like that—a moody young poet; that seemed, on the whole, the most likely explanation; it was also the most pleasing and romantic. She waited. They both waited.
Gumbril looked at her and was put to shame by the spectacle of her quiet serenity. He must do something, he told himself; he must recover the Complete Man’s lost morale. Desperately he came to a halt in front of the one decent picture hanging on the walls. It was an eighteenth-century engraving of Raphael’s ‘Transfiguration’—better, he always thought, in black and white than in its bleakly-coloured original.
“That’s a nice engraving,” he said. “Very nice.” The mere fact of having uttered at all was a great comfort to him, a real relief.
“Yes,” she said, “That belongs to me. I found it in a second-hand shop, not far from here.”
“Photography,” he pronounced, with that temporary earnestness which made him seem an enthusiast about everything, “is a mixed blessing. It has made it possible to reproduce pictures so easily and cheaply, that all the bad artists who were well occupied in the past, making engravings of good men’s paintings, are now free to do bad original work of their own.” All this was terribly impersonal, he told himself, terribly off the point. He was losing ground. He must do something drastic to win it back. But what?