ayed so fine a part in his talk. His was essentially the nature of
an artistic appreciator; he could find interest and beauty in endless
aspects of things that I marked as evil, or at least as not negotiable;
and the impulse I had towards self-deception, to sustained and
consistent self-devotion, disturbed and detached and pointless as it was
at that time, he had indeed a sort of admiration for but no sympathy.
Like many fantastic and ample talkers he was at bottom secretive, and
he gave me a series of little shocks of discovery throughout our
intercourse.

The first of these came in the realisation that he quite seriously meant
to do nothing in the world at all towards reforming the evils he laid
bare in so easy and dexterous a manner. The next came in the sudden
appearance of a person called "Milly"--I've forgotten her surname--whom
I found in his room one evening, simply attired in a blue wrap--the
rest of her costume behind the screen--smoking cigarettes and sharing
a flagon of an amazingly cheap and self-assertive grocer's wine Ewart
affected, called "Canary Sack." "Hullo!" said Ewart, as I came in. "This
is Milly, you know. She's been being a model--she IS a model really....
(keep calm, Ponderevo!) Have some sack?"

Milly was a woman of thirty, perhaps, with a broad, rather pretty face,
a placid disposition, a bad accent and delightful blond hair that waved
off her head with an irrepressible variety of charm; and whenever Ewart
spoke she beamed at him. Ewart was always sketching this hair of hers
and embarking upon clay statuettes of her that were never finished. She
was, I know now, a woman of the streets, whom Ewart had picked up in
the most casual manner, and who had fallen in love with him, but my
inexperience in those days was too great for me to place her then, and
Ewart offered no elucidations. She came to him, he went to her, they
took holidays together in the country when certainly she sustained her
fair share of their expenditure. I suspect him now even of taking money
from her. Odd old Ewart! It was a relationship so alien to my orderly
conceptions of honour, to what I could imagine any friend of mine doing,
that I really hardly saw it with it there under my nose. But I see it
and I think I understand it now....

Before I fully grasped the discursive manner in which Ewart was
committed to his particular way in life, I did, I say, as the broad
constructive ideas of socialism took hold of me, try to get