"Frankly," said Peter, "I don't understand them. It's about a drunkard, isn't it? I see that, but...."
"Don't understand it!" cried the young woman. "What don't you understand?"
"Well, for instance," said Peter, "'Immaculate meteor.' Is that the world, or Bond Street, or the whisky?" He felt her contempt.
She laughed.
"Well, of course, Hacket's poems aren't for everybody," she said.
She got up then, and left him. He knew the report that she would make of him to Temple. He sat there bewildered. He began to feel lonely and a little angry. After all it was not his fault that he had not understood the poem. Or was it the heat of the room? He wished that someone would offer him some tea, but everyone was talking, talking, talking. He sat back and listened. The talk eddied about him, dazing him, retreating, rolling back again. He listened. Every kind of topic was there—men, women, the war, Germany, poetry, homo-sexuality, divorce, adultery, Walt Whitman, Sapho, names, strange names, American names, French names, Russian names, condemning Him, condemning Her, condemning It, the war, Man ... Woman....
Once and again he caught popular names. How they were condemned! The scorn, the languid, insolent scorn. Then pacifism.... He gathered that two of the men in the room had been forced to dig potatoes for the Government because they didn't believe in war. Patriotism! The room quivered with scorn. Patriots! It was as though you had said murderers or adulterers! His anger grew. Robsart was better than this, far, far better. At least Robsart tried to make something out of life. He was not ashamed to be happy. He did not condemn. He was doubtful about himself, too. He would not have asked Peter to lunch had he not been doubtful.... And the arrogance here. The room was thick with it. The self-applause mounted higher and higher. The fat man read one of his poems. Only a few words reached Peter. "Buttock ... blood ... cobra ... loins ... mud ... shrill ... bovine...."
Suddenly he felt as though in another moment he would rush into their midst, striking them apart, crying out against them, as condemnatory, as arrogant as they. He got from his sofa and crept from the room. No one noticed him. In the street the beautiful, cool, evening air could not comfort him. He was wretched, lonely, angry, above all, most bitterly disappointed. It seemed to him as he walked along slowly up Fleet Street that life was really hopeless and useless. On the one side, Robsart; on the other, these arrogant fools, and in the middle, himself, no better than they—worse, indeed—for they at least stood for something, and he for nothing, absolutely nothing. That absurd poem had, at any rate, effort behind it, striving, ambition, hope. He had cared all his life for intellectual things, had longed to achieve some form of beauty, however tiny, however insignificant.... He had achieved nothing. Well, that knowledge would not have beaten him down had he felt the true spirit of greatness in these others. He realised now how deeply he had hoped from that meeting. He had believed in the new world of which they were all talking; he had believed that its creation would be brought about by the forces of art, of brotherhood, of kindliness, and charity, and nobility. And then to go and listen to a meeting like Temple's? But what right had he to judge them, or Robsart, or anyone?
Only too ready to believe himself a failure, it seemed now that the world too was a failure; that the worst things that the pessimists had said during the war were now justified. Above all he detested his own arrogance in judging these other men.