“Not exactly, I’m afraid,” replied Denis, who was more anxious to see those cannas.

“So I perceive.  Wouldn’t you get more fun out of life if you were?  I am nearly done with psychology now,” he added.  “It was the Greek philosophers before then.  When I take up a subject this is what I do.  I don’t ask what are Aristotle’s teachings or relations to his age or to humanity.  That would lead me too far.  I ask myself:  what has this fellow got to say to me?  To me, you understand.  To me.”

“That must simplify matters.”

“It does,” replied Keith, quite unaware of the faint tinge of College irony in the other’s words.  “Direct experience comes only from life.  But you can get a kind of substitute out of books.  Perhaps you are afraid of them?  Take the fellows by the throat!  See what they have to say.  Make them disgorge.  Get at their facts.  Pull them to pieces.  I tell you what, Denis.  You must go through a course of Samuel Butler.  You are moving in the same direction; perhaps he may be a warning to you.  I took him up, I remember, during my biological period.  He was exactly like yourself—­bewildered by phenomena.”

Denis, meekly resigned, enquired: 

“Was he?”

“I spent nearly a week over Butler.  I found him interesting not for what he writes, but for what he is.  A landmark.  Think of when he wrote.  It was an age of giants—­Darwin and the rest of them.  Their facts were too much for him; they impinged on some obscure old prejudices of his.  They drove him into a clever perversity of humour.  They account for his cat-like touches, his contrariness, his fondness for scoring off everybody from the Deity downwards, his premeditated irresponsibilities, his—­”

“Did he not prove that the Odyssey was written by a woman?”

“He did.  Anything to escape from realities—­that was his maxim.  He puzzled his contemporaries.  But we can now locate him with absolute certainty.  He personifies the Revolt from Reason.  Surtout, Mon Ami, point de Zele.  He talks about the Scylla of Atheism and the Charybdis of Christianity—­a state of mind which, by the way, is not conducive to bold navigation.  He was always wavering between the two in an attitude of suburban defiance, reconciling what is irreconcilable by extracting funny analogies all round for the edification of “nice people” like himself.  Oh, very English!  He did not lack candour or intelligence.  Nor do you.  He understood the teachings of the giants.  So do you.  But they irked him.  To revenge himself he laid penny crackers under their pedestals.  His whole intellectual fortune was spent in buying penny crackers.  There was something cheeky and pre-adolescent about him—­a kind of virginal ferocity.  That iridescent charm of sexlessness which somebody, one of these days, must be good enough to analyse for us!  He lacked the male attributes of humility, reverence and sense of proportion.”