"Then why abuse it?" laughed Sypher.
"Because it's a wanton and the wanton angers you and fascinates you at the same time. You never know how to take her. You are aware she hasn't got a heart, but her lips are red. She is unreal. She holds views in defiance of common sense. Which is the nobler thing to do—to dig potatoes or paint a man digging potatoes? She swears to you that the digger is a clod of earth and the painter a handful of heaven. She is talking rot. You know it. Yet you believe her."
Sypher was not convinced by the airy paradoxician. He had a childish idea that painters and novelists and actors were superior beings. Rattenden found this Arcadian and cultivated Sypher's society. They took long walks together on Sunday afternoons.
"After all," said Rattenden, "I can speak freely. I am a pariah among my kind."
Sypher asked why.
"Because I don't play golf. In London it is impossible to be seriously regarded as a literary man unless you play golf."
He found Sypher a good listener. He loved to catch a theory of life, hold it in his hand like a struggling bird while he discoursed about it, and let it go free into the sunshine again. Sypher admired his nimbleness of mind.
"You juggle with ideas as the fellows on the stage do with gilt balls."
"It's a game I learned," said Rattenden. "It's very useful. It takes one's mind off the dull question of earning bread and butter for a wife and five children."
"I wish you'd teach it to me," said Sypher. "I've many wives and many children dependent on me for bread and butter!"