Peter was set speculating vaguely on Rodney’s vivid idealism.  To Peter, ideas, the unseen spirits of life, were remote, neither questioned nor accepted, but simply in the background.  In the foreground, for the moment, were a long white road running through a river valley, and little fortress cities cresting rocky hills, and the black notes of the cypresses striking on a background of silver olives.  In these Peter believed; and he believed in blue Berovieri goblets, and Gobelin tapestries, and in a great many other things that he had seen and saw at this moment; he believed intensely, with a poignant vividness of delight, in all things visible.  For the rest, it was not that he doubted or wondered much; he had not thought about it enough for that; but it was all very remote.  What was spirit, apart from form?  Could it be?  If so, would it be valuable or admirable?  It was the shapes and colours of things, after all, that mattered.  As to the pre-existence of things and their hereafter, Peter seldom speculated; he knew that it was through entering the workshop (or the play-room, he would rather have said) of the phenomenal, where the idea took limiting lines and definite shape and the tangible charm of the sense-apprehended, that life for him became life.  Rodney attained to his real by looking through the manifold veils of the phenomenal, as through so much glass; Peter to his by an adoring delight in their complex loveliness.  He was not a symbolist; he had no love of mystic hints and mist-veiled distances; he was George Herbert’s

  Man who looks on glass
  And on it rests his eye,

because glass was so extremely jolly.  Rodney looked with the mystic’s eyes on life revealed and emerging behind its symbols; Peter with the artist’s on life expressed in the clean and lovely shapes of things, their colours and tangible sweetness.  To Peter Rodney’s idealism would have been impossibly remote; things, as things, had a delightful concrete reality that was its own justification.  They needed to interpret nothing; they were themselves; no veils, but the very inner sanctuary.

Both creeds, that of things visible and that of the idea, were good, and suited to the holders; but for those on whom fortune frequently frowns, for those whose destiny it is to lose and break and not to attain, Peter’s has drawbacks.  Things do break so; break and get lost and are no more seen; and that hurts horribly.  Remains the idea, Rodney would have said; that, being your own, does not get lost unless you throw it away; and, unless you are a fool, you don’t throw it away until you have something better to take its place.