Outside was a bright day—­but he hardly heeded it.  He lay profitlessly thinking.  With the breaking of the flute, that which was slowly breaking had finally shattered at last.  And there was nothing ahead:  no plan, no prospect.  He knew quite well that people would help him:  Francis Dekker or Angus Guest or the Marchese or Lilly.  They would get him a new flute, and find him engagements.  But what was the good?  His flute was broken, and broken finally.  The bomb had settled it.  The bomb had settled it and everything.  It was an end, no matter how he tried to patch things up.  The only thing he felt was a thread of destiny attaching him to Lilly.  The rest had all gone as bare and bald as the dead orb of the moon.  So he made up his mind, if he could, to make some plan that would bring his life together with that of his evanescent friend.

Lilly was a peculiar bird.  Clever and attractive as he undoubtedly was, he was perhaps the most objectionable person to know.  It was stamped on his peculiar face.  Aaron thought of Lilly’s dark, ugly face, which had something that lurked in it as a creature under leaves.  Then he thought of the wide-apart eyes, with their curious candour and surety.  The peculiar, half-veiled surety, as if nothing, nothing could overcome him.  It made people angry, this look of silent, indifferent assurance.  “Nothing can touch him on the quick, nothing can really GET at him,” they felt at last.  And they felt it with resentment, almost with hate.  They wanted to be able to get at him.  For he was so open-seeming, so very outspoken.  He gave himself away so much.  And he had no money to fall back on.  Yet he gave himself away so easily, paid such attention, almost deference to any chance friend.  So they all thought:  Here is a wise person who finds me the wonder which I really am.—­And lo and behold, after he had given them the trial, and found their inevitable limitations, he departed and ceased to heed their wonderful existence.  Which, to say the least of it, was fraudulent and damnable.  It was then, after his departure, that they realised his basic indifference to them, and his silent arrogance.  A silent arrogance that knew all their wisdom, and left them to it.

Aaron had been through it all.  He had started by thinking Lilly a peculiar little freak:  gone on to think him a wonderful chap, and a bit pathetic:  progressed, and found him generous, but overbearing:  then cruel and intolerant, allowing no man to have a soul of his own:  then terribly arrogant, throwing a fellow aside like an old glove which is in holes at the finger-ends.  And all the time, which was most beastly, seeing through one.  All the time, freak and outsider as he was, Lilly knew.  He knew, and his soul was against the whole world.

Driven to bay, and forced to choose.  Forced to choose, not between life and death, but between the world and the uncertain, assertive Lilly.  Forced to choose, and yet, in the world, having nothing left to choose.  For in the world there was nothing left to choose, unless he would give in and try for success.  Aaron knew well enough that if he liked to do a bit of buttering, people would gladly make a success of him, and give him money and success.  He could become quite a favourite.