He talked through the evening; keeping his hold of the simplest thread of speech with his still voice and bearing. Leaving a large, peaceful space when he paused, into which it was easy to drop any sort of reflection that might have arisen in one's mind. Hypo scarcely spoke except to question him and the smooth young man dramatically posed, smoked, in silence. The huge form was a central spectacle, until the light faded and the talk began to die down. Then Alma asked him to play. He rose gigantic in the half light and went to the piano murmuring that he would be pleased to improvise a little. Amazing. With all his foreign experience and his serene mind, his musical reflections would be wonderful. But they were not. His gentle playing was colourless. Vague and woolly. And it brought a silence in which his own silence stood out. He seemed to have retired, politely and gently, but definitely, into himself. The darkness surrounding the one small shaded light began to state the joy of the day. Everyone was beaming quietly with the sense of a glorious day. The tall man was at ease in stillness. In his large quiet atmosphere communication flowed, following serenely on the cessation of sound. Nun danket alle Gott.... How far was he a believer in the old things? His consciousness was the widest in the room; seemed to hold the balance between the old and the new, sympathetically, broad shouldered and rather weary with his burden. Speaking always in a frayed tired voice that would not give in to any single brisk idea. There was room and space and kind shelter in his mind for a woman to state herself, completely, unopposed. But he would not accept conclusions.... His mild smooth shape of words would survive anything; persisting. It was his _style_. With it he carried himself through everything, making his way of talking a thing in itself.... No ideas, no convictions; but something in him that made a perfect manner. A blow between the eyes, flattening him out, would not break it. There was nothing there to break, nothing hard in him. A made mould, chosen, during his growing, filling itself up from life, but not living ... a gentleman, of course, that was it. Then there was an abyss beneath. Unstated things that lived in darkness. But the silence lasted only an instant. Before its test could reveal anything further than the sudden sharp division of the sitters into men and women, Alma made movements to break up the party. Hypo's voice came, enchanting, familiar and new, its qualities renewed by the fresh contacts. The thing to do he said rising, coming forward into the central light, not in farewell, into a self-made arena, with needless challenging sturdiness from one of the distances of his crowded mind. It would be one of his unanswerable fascinating misapprehensions. The thing to _do_ was to go out into the world; leave everything behind, wife, and child and things; go all over the world and come back; _experienced_. "And what about the wives?"