“Let me grumble, young man!” he said. “Try to listen to me with a little human compassion. Try to think what it means—not to see.”
“Yes,” said Landry. “I knew two or three chaps in the army....”
“Oh, asses! Young, healthy lustful animals, filled with their illusion that they’ve saved the world with their blindness. But me! What comfort have I? Landry, if I were God Himself, I couldn’t invent anything more exquisitely hideous than that—to make an artist blind! An artist, who lives—who feeds himself on colour, whose ecstasy is in a line, whose heart and soul are only to be reached through his eyes.... What an idea, eh?”
“Yes,” said Landry. “It must be pretty bad.”
But still he couldn’t help feeling more sorry for those young chaps he had known, blinded in the war, who had had to renounce all the pleasant ways of life. A fellow like Lawrence, with a brain, a fellow who could talk, didn’t, somehow, seem as pitiful to him as those inarticulate, suffering boys. Lawrence was queer, he was eccentric, and he no doubt had queer and eccentric consolations unknown to those others. He sympathised with Lawrence; certainly. But his mind strayed to Rosaleen.
Where had she gone? And with whom? He thought about it with growing uneasiness. At last he took the bull by the horns.
“Where has Rosaleen gone?” he asked, in a tone as Bohemian and casual as he could make it.
“With a new man,” said Lawrence. “A gentlemanly illustrator. Ah, well!... What can one expect?”
Just as Lawrence was beginning one of his terrible dissertations on cooking, there was a knock at the door, and a curly haired young man entered. He asked for Rosaleen without ceremony.
“Out with Brindell, taking a walk,” said Lawrence. “Sit down, Matthews, and have a drink!”