be
interesting, you know, to be there. I shall visit my father's old home
near Odessa. Possibly some of his people may be left round there. I shall
find things out--what the conditions are, why things are happening as
they are, how the people live. I think I shall be better able after that
to find out what the state of things is here. One's too provincial, too
much taken up with one's own corner. Political science is too universal a
thing to learn in that way.'

'And when you've found out? What next?'

'There's no next. It will take me all my life even to begin to find out.
I don't know where I shall be--in London, no doubt, mostly.'

'Do you mean, Arthur, that you're going to chuck work for good? Writing,
I mean, or public work?'

'I hope so. I mean to. Oh, if ever, later on, I feel I have anything I
want to say, I'll say it. But that won't be for years. First I'm going to
learn.... You see, Jane, we can live all right. Thank goodness, I don't
depend on what I earn.... You and I together--we'll learn a lot.'

'Oh, I'm going in for confused self-expression. I'm not taking any vows
of silence. I'm going to write.'

'As you like. Every one's got to decide for themselves. It amuses you,
I suppose.'

'Of course, it does. Why not? I love it. Not only writing, but being in
the swim, making a kind of a name, doing what other people do. I'm not
mother, who does but write because she must, and pipes but as the
linnets do.'

'No, thank goodness. You're as intellectually honest as any one I know,
and as greedy for the wrong things.'

'I want a good time. Why not?'

'Why not? Only that, as long as we're all out for a good time, those of
us who can afford to will get it, and nothing more, and those of us who
can't will get nothing at all. You see, I think it's taking hold of
things by the wrong end. As long as we go on not thinking, not finding
out, but greedily wanting good things--well, we shall be as we are,
that's all--Potterish.'

'You mean I'm Potterish,' observed Jane, without rancour.

'Oh Lord, we all are,' said Gideon in disgust. 'Every profiteer, every
sentimentalist, ever muddler. Every artist directly he thinks of his art
as something marketable, something to bring him fame; every scientist or
scholar (if there are any) who fakes a fact in the interest of his
theory; every fool who talks through his hat without knowing; every
sentimentalist who plays up to the sentimentalism in himself and other
people;