“Much more than that,” Avery earnestly assured him. “It really affects me profoundly sometimes.”
Hazlewood laughed.
“Oh, Maurice, not profoundly. You’ll never be affected profoundly by anything,” he prophesied.
Maurice clicked his thumbs impatiently.
“You always know all about everybody and me in particular, Guy, but though, as you’re aware, I’m a profound materialist——”
“Maurice is plumbing the lead to-night,” Hazlewood interrupted, with a laugh. “He’ll soon transcend all human thought.”
“Here in Cornwall,” Maurice pursued, undaunted, “I really am affected sometimes with a sort of horror of the unknown. You’ll all rag me, and you can, but though I’ve enjoyed myself frightfully, I don’t think I shall ever come to Cornwall again.”
With this announcement he puffed defiance from his pipe.
“Shut up, Maurice!” Hazlewood chaffed. “You’ve been reading Cornish novelists—the sort of people who write about over-emotionalized young men and women acting to the moon in hut-circles or dancing with their own melodramatic Psyches on the top of a cromlech.”
“Do you believe in presentiments, Guy?” Michael broke in suddenly.