| a |
| b |
| b |
| a |
| a |
| b |
| b |
| a and so on. |
He said opprobriously to Captain Mackenzie:
"Do you know what a sonnet is? Give me the rhymes for a sonnet. That's the plan of it."
Mackenzie grumbled:
"Of course I know what a sonnet is. What's your game?"
Tietjens said:
"Give me the fourteen end-rhymes of a sonnet and I'll write the lines. In under two minutes and a half."
Mackenzie said injuriously:
"If you do I'll turn it into Latin hexameters in three. In under three minutes."
They were like men uttering deadly insults the one to the other. To Tietjens it was as if an immense cat were parading, fascinated and fatal, round that hut. He had imagined himself parted from his wife. He had not heard from his wife since her four-in-the-morning departure from their flat, months and eternities ago, with the dawn just showing up the chimney-pots of the Georgian roof-trees opposite. In the complete stillness of dawn he had heard her voice say very clearly "Paddington" to the chauffeur, and then all the sparrows in the inn waking up in chorus. . . . Suddenly and appallingly it came into his head that it might not have been his wife's voice that had said "Paddington," but her maid's . . . He was a man who lived very much by rules of conduct. He had a rule: Never think on the subject of a shock at a moment of shock. The mind was then too sensitized. Subjects of shock require to be thought all round. If your mind thinks when it is too sensitized its then conclusions will be too strong. So he exclaimed to Mackenzie: