“I can answer that,” he said, with venomous bitterness. “Tassar thinks himself an artist, you know. He despises the whole lot of us as numbskulls and Philistines. He’ll tell you that art’s the great thing and that critics of art know much more about it than the damned fools who do it, all there is to be known, in fact.”
Baltazar’s expression as he listened to his half-brother’s speech was a palimpsest of conflicting emotions. The look that predominated, however, was the look of a woman under the lash, waiting her hour. He smiled lightly enough and gesticulated with his delicate hand.
“We all have our secret,” he declared gaily. “Brand thinks he knows mine but he’s as far from knowing it as that new moon over there is from knowing the secret of the tide.”
His words caused them to glance at the window. The clouds had vanished and the thin ghostly crescent peered at them from between the curtains.
“The tide obeys it,” he added significantly, “but it keeps its own counsel.”
“And it has,” put in Sorio fiercely, “depths below depths which it were better for no corpse-world to interfere with!”
Dr. Raughty, who had cleared his throat uneasily several times during the last few moments, now called the attention of the company to a scorched moth which, hurt by one of the candles, lay shuddering upon the edge of the table.
“Hasn’t it exquisite markings?” he said, touching the creature with the tip of his forefinger, and bending forward over it like a lover. “It’s a puss-moth! I wish I had my killing-bottle here. I’d keep it for Horace Pod.”
Sorio suddenly leapt from his seat and made a snatch at the moth.