"Langton," burst out Peter, "I'm sick of prettinesses! I've been stuffed up with them all my life, and so has she. I want to break with them."
"Very likely, and I don't say that it won't be the best thing for you to try for a little to do so, but she hasn't been where you've been or seen what you've seen. You can't expect her wholly to understand. And more than that, maybe she is meant for prettinesses. After all, they're pretty."
Peter stabbed the blotting-paper with his pen. "Then she isn't meant for me," he said.
"I'm not so sure," said Langton. "I don't know that you've stuff enough in you to get on without those same prettinesses yourself. Most of us haven't. And at any rate I wouldn't burn my boats yet awhile. You may want to escape yet."
Peter considered this in silence. Then he drew the sheets to him and added a few more words, folded the paper, put it in the envelope, and stuck it down. "Come on," he said, "let's go and post this and have a walk."
Langton got up and looked at him curiously, as he sometimes did. "Peter," he said, "you're a weird blighter, but there's something damned gritty in you. You take life too strenuously. Why can't you saunter through it like I do?"
Peter reached for this cap. "Come on," he said again, "and don't talk rot."
Out in the street, they strolled aimlessly on, more or less in silence. The big book-shop at the corner detained them for a little, and they regarded its variegated contents through the glass. It contained a few good prints, and many more poorly executed coloured pictures of ruined places in France and Belgium, of which a few, however, were not bad. Cheek by jowl with some religious works, a statue of Notre Dame d'Albert, and some more of Jeanne d'Arc, were a line of pornographic novels and beyond packets of picture post-cards entitled Théâtreuses, Le Bain de la Parisienne, Les Seins des Marbre, and so on. Then Langton drew Graham's attention to one or two other books, one of which had a gaudy cover representing a mistress with a birch-rod in her hands and a number of canes hung up beside her, while a girl of fifteen or so, with very red cheeks, was apparently about to be whipped. "Good Lord," said Langton, "the French are beyond me. This window is a study for you, Graham, in itself. I should take it that it means that there is nothing real in life. It is utterly cynical.
"'And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press,
End in what All begins and ends in—Yes;
Think then you are To-day what Yesterday
You were—To-morrow you shall not be less,'"
he quoted.