After the meal Arthur Jarvin, the critic, arrived with a woman named Edith Colson. Jarvin was almost tall--one of many “almosts” composing his entirety--and the plump old rose oval of his face showed its immense self-satisfaction beneath a fluffy mat of dark brown hair. He wore spectacles and his features bore the petulant satisfaction of one who has eaten too much for breakfast and has not quite decided whether to regret that fact or not. Since he held a contempt for the mad limitations of time he always fondly lengthened the utterance of his many “howevers” and “notwithstandings.” His friend, Edith Colson, was a tall, slender woman who freed a satirical vivacity with each of her words, thus making one regret the fact that she had nothing to say. One felt that to herself she was intrenched upon modest but well-guarded hill-tops of emotion; that, being thinly perverse, she had purchased her castles in Norway and scorned the more treacherous animations of a warmer climate. Her icy effervescences--whirls of powdered snows--sometimes subsided to a softer note which told you that the dab of warmth left within her was reserved for a select two or three beings, and that her conversation was an elaborate form of repentance. Outwardly she offered the effect of a carefully ornamented self-protection. The greenish brown length of her face accepted the problems of a long straight nose, loosely thin lips, and large black eyes, and was topped by a disciplined wealth of brownish black hair. They sat in a circle on the porch and the conversation skipped with too much ease between recent books, plays, and local celebrities among writers and artists. Jarvin, full of the books that had come to him for reviewing purposes, compared and dissected them with the air of a professor who boredly but genially lectures to his special class. “This book was passable: of course it couldn’t come up to so-and-so’s book. This other one--well, not quite as good as his last novel. A little too much of one style, you know. That new Frenchman? Yes, they’re raising quite a fuss over him. Grim, cruel stuff, but well done. Those books lose a lot in the translations, though. That new poet? Mm, he’s lyrical enough but he just misses inspiration. The new crop will have to go a long way before they can approach Shelley or Wordsworth. Have you seen the new Shaw play at the Olympic? After all, Shaw is one of the few men who can make you laugh without being vulgar or obvious,” etc. Carl sat in silence and rearranged, in his head, the difficult line of a new poem, and to his immersion the conversation had become a slightly irritating and well-memorized murmur. Endlessly he muttered to himself: “your face is stencilled with a pensiveness ... pensiveness ... but I need another adjective.”