“He’s a type that suits me. He knows people I know, or would like to have known. He was a friend of Tony Failing’s. It is so hard to realize that a man connected with one was great. Uncle Tony seems to have been. He loved poetry and music and pictures, and everything tempted him to live in a kind of cultured paradise, with the door shut upon squalor. But to have more decent people in the world—he sacrificed everything to that. He would have ‘smashed the whole beauty-shop’ if it would help him. I really couldn’t go as far as that. I don’t think one need go as far—pictures might have to be smashed, but not music or poetry; surely they help—and Jackson doesn’t think so either.”
“Well, I won’t have it, and that’s enough.” She laughed, for her voice had a little been that of the professional scold. “You see we must hang together. He’s in the reactionary camp.”
“He doesn’t know it. He doesn’t know that he is in any camp at all.”
“His wife is, which comes to the same.”
“Still, it’s the holidays—” He and Mr. Jackson had drifted apart in the term, chiefly owing to the affair of Varden. “We were to have the holidays to ourselves, you know.” And following some line of thought, he continued, “He cheers one up. He does believe in poetry. Smart, sentimental books do seem absolutely absurd to him, and gods and fairies far nearer to reality. He tries to express all modern life in the terms of Greek mythology, because the Greeks looked very straight at things, and Demeter or Aphrodite are thinner veils than ‘The survival of the fittest’, or ‘A marriage has been arranged,’ and other draperies of modern journalese.”
“And do you know what that means?”
“It means that poetry, not prose, lies at the core.”
“No. I can tell you what it means—balder-dash.”
His mouth fell. She was sweeping away the cobwebs with a vengeance. “I hope you’re wrong,” he replied, “for those are the lines on which I’ve been writing, however badly, for the last two years.”
“But you write stories, not poems.”