known. He was a friend of Tony Failing's. It is so hard to realize
that a man connected with one was great. Uncle Tony seems to have been.
He loved poetry and music and pictures, and everything tempted him to
live in a kind of cultured paradise, with the door shut upon squalor.
But to have more decent people in the world--he sacrificed everything
to that. He would have 'smashed the whole beauty-shop' if it would help
him. I really couldn't go as far as that. I don't think one need go as
far--pictures might have to be smashed, but not music or poetry; surely
they help--and Jackson doesn't think so either."

"Well, I won't have it, and that's enough." She laughed, for her voice
had a little been that of the professional scold. "You see we must hang
together. He's in the reactionary camp."

"He doesn't know it. He doesn't know that he is in any camp at all."

"His wife is, which comes to the same."

"Still, it's the holidays--" He and Mr. Jackson had drifted apart in
the term, chiefly owing to the affair of Varden. "We were to have the
holidays to ourselves, you know." And following some line of thought,
he continued, "He cheers one up. He does believe in poetry. Smart,
sentimental books do seem absolutely absurd to him, and gods and fairies
far nearer to reality. He tries to express all modern life in the terms
of Greek mythology, because the Greeks looked very straight at things,
and Demeter or Aphrodite are thinner veils than 'The survival of the
fittest', or 'A marriage has been arranged,' and other draperies of
modern journalese."

"And do you know what that means?"

"It means that poetry, not prose, lies at the core."

"No. I can tell you what it means--balder-dash."

His mouth fell. She was sweeping away the cobwebs with a vengeance. "I
hope you're wrong," he replied, "for those are the lines on which I've
been writing, however badly, for the last two years."

"But you write stories, not poems."

He looked at his watch. "Lessons again. One never has a moment's peace."

"Poor Rickie. You shall have a real holiday in the summer." And she
called after him to say, "Remember, dear, about Mr. Jackson. Don't go
talking so much to him."

Rather arbitrary. Her tone had been a little arbitrary of late. But what
did it matter? Mr. Jackson was not a friend, and he must risk the chance
of offending Widdrington. After the lesson he wrote to Ansell, whom he
had not seen since June, asking him to come down to Ilfracom