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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.
Suddenly he regained consciousness, and, more for the sake of covering his loss of self-possession than for that of eating, he recalled the waiter and put some partridge on his plate. Then he looked across the table at his guest and said very sternly: "I look to you to prevent this story going any further." "I've already made it my duty to do so," said Rattenden. Sypher helped his guest to wine.
Zora Middlemist is driven round the earth like Io by the gadfly of her temperament. She's seeking the Beauty or Meaning or Fulfilment, or whatever she chooses to call it, of Life. What she's really looking for is Love." "I don't believe it," said Sypher. Rattenden shrugged his shoulders. "It's true all the same.
They've cut your part clean out of the comedy, and you don't like it. If I'm not right will you kindly order me out of the room? Well?" he asked, after a pause, during which she hung her head. "Oh, you can stay," she said with a half-laugh. "You're the kind of man that always bets on a certainty." Rattenden was right.
A day or two later, meeting Rattenden again, she found that he comprehended her too fully. "What would have pleased you," said he, "would have been to play the soeur noble, to have gathered the young couple in your embrace, and magnanimously given them to each other, and smiled on the happiness of which you had been the bounteous dispenser. They've cheated you.
Sypher said good-by to his guest on the steps of the club, and walked home to his new chambers in St. James's deep in thought. For the first time since his acquaintance with Rattenden, he was glad to part from him. He had a great need of solitude.
"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 her, but he was one of the little men and she had passed him by with her magnificent head in the air. The gastronomic talk languished. Presently Rattenden said: "One of the feminine phenomena that has puzzled me most of late has been the marriage of her sister to Septimus Dix." Sypher laid down his knife and fork. "How extraordinary that you should mention it!
She had broken no man's heart, and her own was whole. The tribes of Crim Tartary had exhibited no signs of worry and had left her unmolested. She had furthermore taken rapturous delight in cathedrals, expensive restaurants, and the set pieces of fashionable scenery. Rattenden had not a prophetic leg to stand on.
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.
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