‘Couldn’t he have been a traveller for a firm that made hand-grenades?’ asked the curate. Charles wondered whether he was mad or just drunk.

‘Not possible,’ Gunning-Forbes shook his head. ‘He was supposed to be the Chief Electrician. He couldn’t have combined the two jobs. No good novelist would bring in anything as far­fetched as that. A course of Thackeray, that’s my prescription—soon weed out these little faults. Then you might make some real headway.’

He sat back benevolently. Froulish flushed scarlet. He began to sway backwards and forwards in his chair, feverishly flicking his short fingers: the usual sign that he was violently agitated. Charles held his breath for the outburst. But it was forestalled.

Hutchins had hitherto been mercifully silent, dividing his energies between fawning on the thick-set siren beside him and looking superciliously round the room; but now he decided, evidently, that the time had come for him to put on his act and dazzle the company. He took out a pipe and filled it. Charles could see from the light colour and stringy texture of the tobacco that it was some kind of very mild mixture; he was not surprised, for Hutchins, though needing a pipe for the successful acting of his part, was handicapped by a weak stomach. Even now he did not light the pipe, but stuck it in his mouth, pulled it out again, twiddled it in his fingers, and finally jammed it between his front teeth and spoke in an exaggeratedly precise, high-pitched voice.

‘I suppose, Froulish, that what you’re doing there is something that might be described by an ordinary chap like me—’ he smiled boyishly, to show that they were not to believe him—‘as a return to allegory. Would you place yourself in a direct line of descent from Kafka?’

He waited for Froulish’s reply with the calm, condescending air of a man who is accustomed to examining ideas and putting them in order, but is nevertheless prepared to have patience with those who habitually leave a mass of tangled loose ends. The young scholar doing a little intellectual slumming.

‘No,’ replied Froulish shortly. ‘My masters are Dante, Spinoza, Rimbaud, Boehme and Grieg.’

Hutchins champed agitatedly on his pipe-stem. His face lost a little of its buoyant expression; he was not sure whether his leg was being pulled, and it was important for him, having entered the lists under the eye of his lady, to come off best.