"I shouldn't have thought anybody could have been so incredibly slow to grasp an idea—!" cried Walter, his hands aloft.
"Have—you—ever—been—to—Blackpool—when—t' Wakes—is on?"
Then Cosimo called again—
"Walter! I say! Come here!... Dickie's just told me something that makes the 'Life and Work' rather necessary, I think!——"
And Walter turned his back on the miner and joined his wife and Dickie and Cosimo.
Anybody who wasn't anybody might have supposed the noise to be a series of wrangles, but of course it wasn't so at all really. Issues far too weighty hung in the balance. It is all very well for people whose mental range is limited by matinées and Brooklands and the newest car to talk in pleasant and unimpassioned voices, but what was going to happen to Art unless Cosimo hurled himself and the 'Life and Work' against this heretic Van Gogh, and what was to become of England if Walter allowed a pig-headed man who could say nothing but "Blackpool Pier, Blackpool Pier," to shout him down, and what would happen to Civilization if Mr. Wilkinson did not, figuratively speaking, take hold of the dilettante Brimby and shake him as a terrier shakes a rat? No: there would be time enough for empty politenesses when the battle was won.
In the meantime, a mere nobody might have thought they were merely excessively rude to one another.
Then began fresh combinations and permutations of the talk. Mr. Wilkinson, whose square-cut pilot jacket somehow added to the truculence of his appearance, planted himself firmly for conversation before Dickie Lemesurier; the miner, whose head at a little distance appeared bald, but on a closer view was seen to be covered with football-cropped and plush-like bristles, nudged Cosimo's hip, to attract his attention: and Walter Wyron sprang forward with a welcoming "Hallo, Raffinger!" as the door opened and two young McGrath students were added to the crowd. For a minute no one voice preponderated in the racket; it was—
"Hallo, Raff! Thought you weren't coming!"