Mr. Blearney’s ‘man’ was not wearing his white coat this time. His off-white shirt sleeves flickered dully to and fro as he fetched toast, eggs, and coffee. Charles found himself reviving at remark­able speed; in the closing stages of the meal he launched into a rather selective account of his immediate past and present situation. Mr. Blearney, who was obviously shrewd enough to see that a good deal was being missed out, was also old and cautious enough to stifle any feelings of curiosity about the omissions. He had heard enough secrets to last him his lifetime. Looking across at the pouchy, bulbous comedian’s face, Charles wondered why this man bothered to be kind to him. Perhaps there was really no explanation other than the obvious one, that geniality had been the driving force of his life for so long that it had consumed everything else: unless there was someone at hand to be genial to, he would die. Besides, there was the undeclared war between people of Mr. Blearney’s type and people of the ordinary, con­ventional type; the smaller group, the active minority, sought each other out for mutual support against the heavy, unleavened mass on which they looked with alternate suspicion, patronizing affection, and contempt. When the mass did the right thing, they were ‘the public’ (‘the public, bless them, took me to their hearts right from the first’); when they did not react satisfactorily, they were simply ‘them’ (‘just can’t get them moving to-night’, ‘if this doesn’t knock them in the aisles, well, blast ’em’); and in times of lowered circumstances, you simply preyed on the less reputable impulses to which the mass was subject, when its members became plain suckers (‘one born every minute, you needn’t starve’). This secret society, unconsciously sworn to the task of providing the vibrations that caused wear and tear in the structure of normal living, consciously pledged to working themselves to a standstill at anything that did not look like normal work, this invisible Trade Union, had been waiting for Charles ever since he first failed to take root in the cliff-side of a shattered bourgeoisie. He had tried manual work, he had tried crime, he had tried being a servant, and now he was sitting opposite Mr. Blearney, director of (among other things) the Golden Peach Club, accepting his hospitality, waiting for him to suggest some way out of his difficulties. With uncanny vividness, derived partly from fatigue, his consciousness freed itself from his body, sitting there at the table, and watched the scene, cleverly picking out the allegorical elements. The young man (Hopeless) breaks out of the prison of Social and Economic Maladjustment; he carries on his back a hundredweight of granite known as Education. After a skirmish with the dragon Sex, in which he is aided by a false friend, Giant Crime, he comes to the illusory citadel called Renunciation of Ambition. And so on. What an allegory it would make! Of course he would have to think up some more catchy names for these abstractions, but that would be easy enough.