He went over to talk to Comrade-Editor Bobbe. Mr. Bobbe was a sandy-haired, narrow-chested little man with spiteful blue eyes and a malevolent class-hatred. He exercised his malevolence with comparative impunity by trading upon his working-class origin and his heart disease, of which he had been dying for twenty years. Nobody of decent breeding could hit Mr. Bobbe as he deserved, because his looks were a perpetual reminder of his disease, and his behaviour and habits gave continual evidence of his origin. He was the Thersites of the day, or rather that would have been the only excuse for him. Intellectually he was Rousseau’s sedulous and somewhat lousy ape. His conversation rasped. His vanity and class-consciousness made him yearn for affairs with upper class women, although he was obviously a homosexual type. Admirable energy, a swift and sometimes remarkable intuition into character, a good memory and excellent faculty of imitation, a sharp tongue and brutal frankness, gave him power. He was a little snipe, but a dangerous one. Although biassed and sometimes absurd, his weekly political articles were by far the best of the day. He might have been a real influence in the rapidly growing Socialist Party if he could have controlled his excessive malevolence, curbed his hankering for aristocratic alcoves, and dismissed his fatuous theories of the Unconscious, which were a singular mixture of misapprehended theosophy and ill-digested Freud. George admired his feverish energy and talents, pitied him for his ill-health and agonized sense of class inferiority, disliked his malevolence, and ignored his theories. “What are _you_ doing here, Winterbourne? I shouldn’t have thought Shobbe would invite _you_. You haven’t any money, have you?” “Upjohn brought me along.” “Upjohn-and-at-’em? What’s he want of you?” “An article on his new school of painting, I think.” Mr. Bobbe tittered, screwing up his eyes and nose in disgust, and flapping his right hand with a gesture of take-it-away-it-stinks. “Suprematist painting! Suprematist dung-bags! Suprematist conceit and empty-headed charlatanism. Did you see him toady to that Carter woman, _Lady_ Carter? Puh!” There was such vindictiveness in that “puh” that George was disconcerted. True, he himself suspected Mr. Upjohn was a bit of a charlatan and knew he was odiously conceited; at the same time, there was something very kind-hearted and generous in poor Upjohn-and-at-’em, who had received that nickname for his furious onslaughts on any one who was established and successful in alleged defence of any one who was struggling and neglected. Unfortunately, these vituperative efforts of poor Mr. Upjohn did no good to his friends and served only to bring himself advertisement—the advertisement of ridiculousness. But George felt he ought to say something in defence. “Well, of course, he’s eccentric and sometimes offensive, but he’s got a streak of curious genius and real generosity.”