“Twenty-five? Good Lord, it’s nearly fifteen years since I was twenty-five. Fifteen years, fighting all the time. God, how I hate people sometimes! Everybody. It’s not their malignity I mind; I can give them back as good as they give me. It’s their power of silence and indifference, it’s their capacity for making themselves deaf. Here am I with something to say to them, something important and essential. And I’ve been saying it for more than fifteen years, I’ve been shouting it. They pay no attention. I bring them my head and heart on a charger, and they don’t even notice that the things are there. I sometimes wonder how much longer I can manage to go on.” His voice had become very low, and it trembled. “One’s nearly forty, you know....” The voice faded huskily away into silence. Languidly and as though the business exhausted him, he began mixing colours on his palette. Mrs. Viveash looked at him. No, he wasn’t young; at the moment, indeed, he seemed to have become much older than he really was. An old man was standing there, peaked and sharp and worn. He had failed, he was unhappy. But the world would have been unjuster, less discriminating if it had given him success. “Some people believe in you,” she said; there was nothing else for her to say. Lypiatt looked up at her. “You?” he asked. Mrs. Viveash nodded, deliberately. It was a lie. But was it possible to tell the truth? “And then there is the future,” she reassured him, and her faint death-bed voice seemed to prophesy with a perfect certainty. “You’re not forty yet; you’ve got twenty, thirty years of work in front of you. And there were others, after all, who had to wait—a long time—sometimes till after they were dead. Great men; Blake, for instance....” She felt positively ashamed; it was like a little talk by Doctor Frank Crane. But she felt still more ashamed, when she saw that Casimir had begun to cry and that the tears were rolling, one after another, slowly down his face. He put down his palette, he stepped on to the dais, he came and knelt at Mrs. Viveash’s feet. He took one of her hands between his own and he bent over it, pressing it to his forehead, as though it were a charm against unhappy thoughts, sometimes kissing it; soon it was wet with tears. He wept almost in silence. “It’s all right,” Mrs. Viveash kept repeating, “it’s all right,” and she laid her free hand on his bowed head, she patted it comfortingly as one might pat the head of a large dog that comes and thrusts its muzzle between one’s knees. She felt, even as she made it, how meaningless and unintimate the gesture was. If she had liked him, she would have run her fingers through his hair; but somehow his hair rather disgusted her. “It’s all right, all right.” But, of course, it wasn’t all right; and she was comforting him under false pretences and he was kneeling at the feet of somebody who simply wasn’t there—so utterly detached, so far away she was from all this scene and all his misery.