“Um,” Grainger gave an inarticulate grunt, “just about what he’s fit for, isn’t it? to help dying people out of the world.”
Eppie received this in silence, and he went on: “He looks rather like a priest, or a poet—something decorative and useless.”
“Would you call Buddha decorative and useless?”
“After all, Palairet isn’t a Hindoo. One expects something more normal from a white man.”
His odd penetration was hurting her, but she laughed at his complacent Anglo-Saxondom. “If you want a white man, what do you make of the one who wrote the Imitation?”
“Make of him? Nothing. Nor any one else, I fancy. What does your young Palairet do?” Grainger brought the subject firmly back from her digression.
Eppie was sitting in the window-seat, and, leaning her head back, framed in an arabesque of creepers, she now owned, after a little pause, and as if with a weariness of evasion she was willing to let him see as she did: “Nothing, really.”
“Does he care about anything?” Grainger placed himself opposite her, folding his arms with an air of determined inquiry.
And again Eppie owned, “He believes in nothing, so how can he care?”
“Believes in nothing? What do you mean by that?”