‘It’s simply and solely because we’re all, poor wretches, dumb—dumb as butts of Malmsez; dumb as drummerless drums. Here am I, ass that I am, trickling out this—this whey that no more expresses me than Tupper does Sappho. But that’s what I want to mean. How inexhaustibly rich everything is, if you only stick to life. Here it is packed away behind these rotting covers, just the real thing, no respectable stodge; no mere parasitic stuff; not more than a dozen poets; scores of outcasts and vagabonds—and the real thing in vagabonds is pretty rare in print, I can tell you. We’re all, every one of us, sodden with facts, drugged with the second-hand, and barnacled with respectability until—until the touch comes. Goodness knows where from; but there’s no mistaking it; oh no!’ ‘But what,’ said Lawford uneasily, ‘what on earth do you mean by the touch?’ ‘I mean when you cease to be a puppet only and sit up in the gallery too. When you squeeze through to the other side. When you suffer a kind of conversion of the mind; become aware of your senses. When you get a living inkling. When you become articulate to yourself. When you _see_.’ ‘I am awfully stupid,’ Lawford murmured, ‘but even now I don’t really follow you a bit. But when, as you say, you do become articulate to yourself, what happens then?’ ‘Why, then,’ said Herbert with a shrug almost of despair, ‘then begins the weary tramp back. One by one drop off the truisms, and the Grundyisms, and the pedantries, and all the stillborn claptrap of the marketplace sloughs off. Then one can seriously begin to think about saving one’s soul.’ ‘Saving one’s soul,’ groaned Lawford; ‘why, I am not even sure of my own body yet.’ He walked slowly over to the window and with every thought in his head as quiet as doves on a sunny wall, stared out into the garden of green things growing, leaves fading and falling water. ‘I tell you what,’ he said, turning irresolutely, ‘I wonder if you could possibly find time to write me out a translation of Sabathier. My French is much too hazy to let me really get at the chap. He’s gone now; but I really should like to know what kind of stuff exactly he has left behind.’ ‘Oh, Sabathier!’ said Herbert, laughing. ‘What do you think of that, Grisel?’ he asked, turning to his sister, who at that moment had looked in at the door. ‘Here’s Mr Lawford asking me to make a translation of Sabathier. Lunch, Lawford.’ Lawford sighed. And not until he had slowly descended half the narrow uneven stairs that led down to the dining-room did he fully realise the guile of a sister that could induce a hopeless bookworm to waste a whole morning over the stupidest of companions, simply to keep his tired-out mind from rankling, and give his Sabathier a chance to go to roost. ‘I think, do you know,’ he managed to blurt out at last ‘I think I ought to be getting home again. The house is empty—and—’