Chapter 19 - Page 2

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 Ilfracombe, if only for a day. On reading the letter over, its tone displeased him. It was quite pathetic: it sounded like a cry from prison. "I can't send him such nonsense," he thought, and wrote again. But phrase it as he would the letter always suggested that he was unhappy. "What's wrong?" he wondered. "I could write anything I wanted to him once." So he scrawled "Come!" on a post-card. But even this seemed too serious. The post-card followed the letters, and Agnes found them all in the waste-paper basket.

Then she said, "I've been thinking--oughtn't you to ask Mr. Ansell over? A breath of sea air would do the poor thing good."

There was no difficulty now. He wrote at once, "My dear Stewart, We both so much wish you could come over." But the invitation was refused. A little uneasy he wrote again, using the dialect of their past intimacy. The effect of this letter was not pathetic but jaunty, and he felt a keen regret as soon as it slipped into the box. It was a relief to receive no reply.

He brooded a good deal over this painful yet intangible episode. Was the pain all