Gideon came up to Jane and Charles.  He had just arrived.  He had three evening papers in his hand.  His fellow passengers had left them in the train, and he had collected them.  Jews often get their news that way.

Johnny saw his friend Miss Nancy Sharpe disengaged and looking lovely, and went to speak to her.  He was really in love with her a little, though he didn’t go as far as wanting to work for her and keep her.  He was quite right; that is to go too far, when so much happiness is attainable short of it.  Johnny wisely shunned desperate measures.  So, to do her justice, did Miss Sharpe.

‘Johnny’s very elated,’ said Jane to Gideon, looking after him.  ’What do you think of his book, Arthur?’

Gideon said, ’I don’t think of it.  I’ve had no reason to, particularly.  I’ve not had to review it....  I’m afraid I’m hopeless about novels just now, that’s the fact.  I’m sick of the form—­slices of life served up cold in three hundred pages.  Oh, it’s very nice; it makes nice reading for people.  But what’s the use?  Except, of course, to kill time for those who prefer it dead.  But as things in themselves, as art, they’ve been ruined by excess.  My critical sense is blunted just now.  I can hardly feel the difference, though I see it, between a good novel and a bad one.  I couldn’t write one, good or bad, to save my life, I know that.  And I’ve got to the stage when I wish other people wouldn’t.  I wish every one would shut up, so that we could hear ourselves think—­like in the Armistice Day pause, when all the noise stopped.’

Jane shook her head.

’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.’