"He's been accusing me, has he? What's the swine been saying?"
"Now, now, sir, don't let it bother you. Everything's easily proved, isn't it?. But I wanted to talk to you, sir," he added, turning to Maurice as though he had dismissed the subject, "about this Mr. Rainger. He said you two had been together most of last evening; and, since he'd drunk himself a bit over the mark, I was curious as to how many other-um-hallucinations he might have got."
Maurice pushed back his plate. and meticulously folded his napkin. Then he folded his hands. Against the gray light his big forehead, unwieldy for the frail body, threw into shadow those curious pale-gray eyes with the tiny black pupils. He looked muddled and mildly deprecating.
"An, yes," he said. "Er-where was I? Let me see. You ah wish me to satisfy you that I did not commit this murder."
"Sir?"
"I was, of course, ah, answering the spirit of your question rather than the precise words. " He was apologetic, as though there were nothing at all odd in this, and took the whole thing for granted. "So Mr. Rainger has been drinking? I do not approve of drinking, because the world has a tendency to use alcohol as a drug against tedium. It is not that I disapprove of a drug against tedium, but I prefer that the drug against tedium should be purely intellectual. Do you follow me, sir?. I-ah-perceive that you do not. I was referring to a study of the past."
Masters nodded his big head, with a show of deep interest.
"Ah," he agreed wisely. "Reading history, sir. Quite. Very instructive. I'm fond of it myself."
"Surely," said Maurice Bohun, "that is-ah-not quite what you mean, sir?" A faint crease ruffled his forehead. "Let me see. You mean that you once read a chapter of Macaulay or Froude, and were pleased with it and yourself when you discovered it to be a little less dull than you had anticipated. You were not inclined to read further, but at least you felt that your interest in history had been permanently aroused… But I really meant something deeper than that. I referred to the process that is nowadays — slurringly termed `living in the past.' I frankly live in the past. It is the only mode of existence in which I find it possible to skip the dull days."
His smooth, pleasant voice rarely lifted or altered its tone. With his elbow on the table, and the fingers of a frail hand shading his eyes, he was still mildly deprecating. But Bennett, who had been wolfishly eating, looked up. He began to feel the power of this vague-looking man's personality; the wire and subtle strength of his ruling in this house. Bennett did not like the man, because he had a nervous schoolboy sensation, under the look of those disconcerting pin-point eye pupils, of having come to class unprepared before a gently satiric master with a habit of calling on you in the last five minutes before the bell.