Michael said, "How about us when people imitate us? Have we got to go?"
Morton Ellis looked at him and blinked. "No," he said. "No. We haven't got to go."
"I don't see how you get out of it."
"I get out of it by doing things that can't be imitated."
There was a silence in which everybody thought of Mr. George Wadham. It made Mr. Wadham so uncomfortable that he had to break it.
"I say, how about Shakespeare?" he said.
"Nobody, so far, has imitated Shakespeare, any more than they have succeeded in imitating me."
There was another silence while everybody thought of Morton Ellis as the imitator of every poetic form under the sun except the forms adopted by his contemporaries.
"That's all very well, Ellis," said Stephen, "but you aren't the Holy Ghost coming down out of heaven. We can trace your sources."
"My dear Stephen, I never said I was the Holy Ghost. Nobody ever does come down out of heaven. You can trace my sources, thank God, because they're clean. I haven't gone into every stream that swine like--and--and--and--and--" (he named five contemporary distinctions) "have made filthy with their paddling."