'You may be sure we shan't do that. Not likely. We all want to hear ourselves talk. And quite right too. We've got things to say.' 'Nothing of importance. Few things that wouldn't be better unsaid. Life isn't talking.' 'A journalist's is,' Jane pointed out, and he nodded. 'Quite true. Horribly true. It's chiefly myself I'm hitting at. But at least we journalists don't take ourselves solemnly; we know our stuff is babble to fill a moment. Novelists and poets don't always know that; they're apt to think it matters. And, of course, so far as any of them can make and hold beauty, even a fragment of it here and there, it does matter. The trouble is that they mostly can't do anything of the sort. They don't mostly even know how to try. All but a few verse-makers are shallow, muddled, or sentimental, and most novelists are commercial as well. They haven't the means; they aren't adequately equipped; they've nothing in them worth the saying. Why say it, then? A little cleverness isn't worth while.' 'You're morbid, Arthur.' 'Morbid? Diseased? I dare say. We most of us are. What's health, after all? No one knows.' 'I've done eighty thousand words of my novel, anyhow.' 'I'm sorry. Nearly all novels are too long. All you've got to say would go into forty thousand.' 'I don't write because I've got things to say. I haven't a message, like mother. I write because it amuses me. And because I like to be a novelist. It's done. And I like to be well spoken of--reasonably well, that is. It's all fun. Why not?' 'Oh, don't ask _me_ why not. I can't preach sermons all the evening.' He smiled down on her out of his long sad black eyes, glad of her because she saw straight and never canted, impatient of her because her ideals were commercial, loving her because she was gray-eyed and white-skinned and desirable, seeing her much as Nancy Sharpe, who lived for music, saw Johnny Potter, only with ardour instead of nonchalance; such ardour, indeed, that his thoughts of her only intermittently achieved exactitude. Two girls came up to admire Charles. Jane said it was time she took him to bed, and they went up with her. Gideon turned away. He hated parties, and seldom went even to Jane's. He stood drinking coffee and watching people. You met most of them at the club and elsewhere continually; why meet them all again in a drawing-room? There was his sister Rosalind and her husband Boris Stefan with their handsome faces and masses of black hair. Rosalind had a baby too (at home); a delicate, pretty, fair-haired thing, like Rosalind's Manchester mother. And Charles was like Jane's Birmingham father. It was Manchester and Birmingham that persisted, not Palestine or Russia.