"Time means nothing. You can't make Narcissus into the Prelude from Tristan by working on it. The germ would be here."
"But we are learning, Wenny. Taught by our ideal of the past, of the Greeks and the people of the Renaissance, we are learning to surround ourselves with beautiful things, to live less ugly, money-grabbing lives."
"Culture, you mean. God, I'd rather rot in Childs' dairy lunches. Culture's mummifying the corpse with scented preservatives. Better let it honestly putrefy, I say."
"And while we argue about how we ought to live, things muddle along," said Nan.
"And the months go by ... Look at me, I'm twenty-three years old and I've done nothing ever, never anything of any sort," cried Wenny savagely.
"But you're not even hatched yet, Wenny. Give yourself time ... When you've got your M. A."
"Won't be any different ten years from now. I know it won't. You know it won't."
Nobody answered. Wenny walked along at Nan's side, his fists clenching and unclenching nervously. They had reached the Park Street corner of the Common where the steeple of the church stood up lithe and slender out of the muddle of arclights into the tumultuous sky where the frayed edges of clouds trailed along ruddy from the reflection of streets. In the lee of the subway stations sailors loafed with the broad collars of their jackets turned up watching the wind tussle with the skirts of a couple of girls who strutted back and forth with jerky impatient steps. A trail of Salvation Army lasses hobbled by following a fat redcheeked man with a cornet. Through the narrow crowded street towards Scollay Square the wind was less searching. In the floods of light in front of the moving picture houses dapper young men in overcoats belted at the waist waited for girls they had made dates with. A fat man threw away his cigarette and advanced towards a blonde girl who had just crossed the street; with one hand he was straightening his necktie. The smile on his puffy, razorscraped face kindled in her straight lips. Up a side street a man in a red sweater was preaching about something in a voice like a sea lion's. In the middle of the Square a policeman had hold of a holloweyed little man whiskered like a bottle cleaner whom he was shaking by the shoulder and roaring at. Wenny jumped back to avoid a truck lumbering up noisily out of Cornhill. Why didn't I let it run over me? Then the shop windows of Hanover Street full of price-signs were sliding past. Wenny felt vague interest in the streets and people he was walking among, the sort of disconnected interest he had felt when a child in the tableaux in the Old Mill at Revere, gliding along through expressionless dark, occasionally peering out at incidents, random gestures and faces. A year ago, he was thinking, I would have imagined every man, woman and child I met part of some absurd romantic vortex I was just on the point of being sucked into myself. I know better now. Do I?
"Funny, the thought," he said aloud, "That I pass people on the street and say to myself what wonderful lives they must be living, and they look at me out of their own emptiness and say the same thing... We're going to the Venice, aren't we?"
"Mind, no garlic," put in Fanshaw.