is friend of yours before the blessed Court
of Beacon, and to clear him too--clear him of both crime and lunacy.
Just listen to me while I preach to you for a bit." They walked up
and down the darkening garden together as Michael Moon went on.

"Can you," asked Michael, "shut your eyes and see some of those queer old
hieroglyphics they stuck up on white walls in the old hot countries.
How stiff they were in shape and yet how gaudy in colour.
Think of some alphabet of arbitrary figures picked out in black and red,
or white and green, with some old Semitic crowd of Nosey Gould's
ancestors staring at it, and try to think why the people put it
up at all."

Inglewood's first instinct was to think that his perplexing friend
had really gone off his head at last; there seemed so reckless
a flight of irrelevancy from the tropic-pictured walls he was
asked to imagine to the gray, wind-swept, and somewhat chilly
suburban garden in which he was actually kicking his heels.
How he could be more happy in one by imagining the other he could
not conceive. Both (in themselves) were unpleasant.

"Why does everybody repeat riddles," went on Moon abruptly,
"even if they've forgotten the answers? Riddles are easy to remember
because they are hard to guess. So were those stiff old symbols
in black, red, or green easy to remember because they had been hard
to guess. Their colours were plain. Their shapes were plain.
Everything was plain except the meaning."

Inglewood was about to open his mouth in an amiable protest, but Moon
went on, plunging quicker and quicker up and down the garden and smoking
faster and faster. "Dances, too," he said; "dances were not frivolous.
Dances were harder to understand than inscriptions and texts.
The old dances were stiff, ceremonial, highly coloured but silent.
Have you noticed anything odd about Smith?"

"Well, really," cried Inglewood, left behind in a collapse of humour,
"have I noticed anything else?"

"Have you noticed this about him," asked Moon, with unshaken persistency,
"that he has done so much and said so little? When first he came he talked,
but in a gasping, irregular sort of way, as if he wasn't used to it.
All he really did was actions--painting red flowers on black gowns or throwing
yellow bags on to the grass. I tell you that big green figure is figurative--
like any green figure capering on some white Eastern wall."

"My dear Michael," cried Inglewood, in a rising irritation