Above her Mammon glowed, behind her leered Priapus.
Through the sunny streets, Paliser drove to the Athenæum, where everybody was talking war. The general consensus of ignorance was quite normal.
Lennox, seated with Jones at a window, was summarising his own point of view. "In a day or two I shall run down to Mineola, Perhaps they will take me on at the aviation field. Anyway I can try."
Jones crossed himself. He is signing his death-warrant, he thought. But he said: "Take you, Icarus. They will fly away with you. You will become a cavalier of the clouds, a toreador of the aerial arena, an archangel soaring among the Eolian melodies of shrapnel. I envy, I applaud, but I cannot emulate. The upper circles are reserved for youth and over musty tomes I have squandered mine. I am thirty-two by the clock and I should hie me to the grave-digger that he may take my measure. And yet if I could—if I could!—I would like to be one of the liaison chaps and fall if I must in a shroud of white swords."
Sombrely Lennox considered his friend. "Your shroud of white swords is ridiculous."
Jones agreed with him. To change the subject, he rattled a paper. "Have you seen this? There is an account here of a man who shot his girl. He thought her untrue. Probably she was."
"Reason enough then," said Lennox, who latterly had become very murderous.
"I wonder! Anyway, though the paper does not say so, that was not his reason. The poor devil killed her not because she had been untrue, but because he loved her. He killed the thing he loved the best out of sheer affection. Unfortunately, for his virtues, he loved her innocently, ignorantly, as most men do love, without any idea that the one affection worth giving is a love that nothing can alter, a love that can not only forgive but console."
"Is that what you call originality?" Lennox severely enquired. "If so, I have never run across any of it in your books."
"Heaven forbid that you should, dear boy. I live by the sweat of my pen. Originality never has, and never will make a best-seller."