The old man nodded. "Your difficulties do seem to have been smoothed out."
He sat, fitting the tips of his fingers together and swinging his leg, in his desk-chair. The light of the green-shaded desk-lamp alone lit up the room. In the semi-obscurity porcelains and potteries gleamed like crystals in a cave. Ashley paced the floor, emerging from minute to minute out of the gloom into the radiance of the lamp.
"I'm not called on to go poking behind things to see what's there, now am I?"
"Not in the least."
"I'm willing to consider every one, and I think I do. But there are limits, by Jove! Now, really?"
"The minute we recognize limits it's our duty not to go beyond them. It's thus far and no farther—for the man who knows the stretch of his tether, at any rate. The trouble with Peter is that his tether is elastic. It'll spin out as far as he sees the need to go. For the rest of us there are limits, as you say; but about him there's something—something you might call limitless."
Ashley rounded sharply. "You mean he's so big that no one can be bigger."
"Not exactly. I mean that very few of us need to be as big as that. It's all very well for him; but most of us have to keep within the measure of our own capacity."
"And sit down under him, while he looms up into God knows where?"
"Well, wouldn't that be your idea?"