R—— replied gaily, advancing to the newspaper stall.
He bought the Pink 'Un and I laughed....
"And so you read Pragmatism," he mused, "while the fate of the Empire stands in the balance."
"Yes," said I, "and the Paris Academy of Sciences were discussing the functions of θ [Greek: Thèta] and the Polymorphism of Antarctic diatoms last September when the Germans stood almost at the gates of Paris."
This was a lucky stroke for me, for he knew he was rubbing me on the raw. We are, of course, great friends, but sometimes we get on one another's nerves.
"I am polychromatic," I declaimed, "rhetorical, bass. You—besides being a bally fool—are of a pretty gray colour, a baritone and you paint in water-colours."
"Whereas you, of course, would paint in blood?" he answered facetiously.
His Oxford education has a firm hold on him. He says for example, "e converso" instead of "on the other hand" and "entre nous" for "between ourselves." He labels his paragraphs α, β, γ, instead of a, b, c, and quotes Juvenal, knows Paris and Naples, visits the Alps for the winter sports, all in the approved manner of dons.
Not infrequently he visits the East End to Study "how the poor live," he lectures at Toynbee Hall, and calls the proletariat "the prolly." In fact, he does everything according to the regulations, being a socialist and an agnostic, a follower of Shaw and a devotee of Bunyan. "Erotic" he is careful to pronounce eròtic to show he knows Greek, and the "Duma," the Dumà, tho' he doesn't know Russian. Like any don, he is always ready to discuss and give an opinion on any sub- supra- or circum-lunary subject from bimetallism to the Symphony as an art-form.
"That's a dominant fifth," I said to him the other day; no answer.