"Exactly. He can work just as he can go to sleep, almost without knowing that he's doing it. It's a matter of habit. He's almost forgotten how he used to despise that sort of thing." "Do you think he ever did?" "Of course, or his work wouldn't be as good as it is." "I can't understand people ceasing to be keen." "I can. You only need to wobble a very little to come down on the wrong side. Then you're done for--in Hell. And after a bit you find that you quite like it, except in awful moments when you realise that after all it is Hell and that you might so easily have been in Heaven." "I know what you mean. You mean that the whole thing rests with yourself. But it's rotten luck when you're weak and can't help doing the wrong thing though you see the right thing the whole time." "But we're all like that. We only go to Hell when we do the wrong thing and pretend that it's the right." "How did you find that out?" "By a careful study of Hell and its inhabitants." "Then you don't mean the Hell one's people talk about?" "No. I mean here and now, the world as it is. I'm not interested in any other." "Neither am I. Hurray!" This conversation was the first of many. Haslam used to wait for Serge and walk with him as far as their roads lay together. He was an ambitious young man with his eyes set on the road to London, not so much because he was eager for fame and material rewards as because he was hotly impatient of art which stopped short at Benskin and Beecroft. "But," Serge would say, "Benskin and Beecroft will both die." "I know, but there'll be a new Beecroft and a new Benskin by that time." "That's true. We shall never be rid of them." "I expect London is crammed full of Benskins and Beecrofts." "Maybe, but there are more of the other sort there too." "If I don't reach London by the time I'm twenty-seven I shall throw up the sponge." "Why twenty-seven?" asked Serge, smiling. "Oh! if a man hasn't done something by the time he's twenty-seven he never will." "I'm a good deal more than that. . ." "But you've done everything. You've made yourself. You're not really any older than I am, and everybody here is so horribly old." "Yes, they all come to a bad and perfectly respectable end." Haslam swung his fist in the air and shouted indignantly: