I had made up my mind to
put the whole thing before him, partly to see how he took it, and partly
to hear how it sounded when it was said. I asked him to come and eat
with me in an Italian place near Panton Street where one could get a
curious, interesting, glutting sort of dinner for eighteen-pence. He
came with a disconcerting black-eye that he wouldn't explain. "Not so
much a black-eye," he said, "as the aftermath of a purple patch....
What's your difficulty?"
"I'll tell you with the salad," I said.
But as a matter of fact I didn't tell him. I threw out that I was
doubtful whether I ought to go into trade, or stick to teaching in
view of my deepening socialist proclivities; and he, warming with the
unaccustomed generosity of a sixteen-penny Chianti, ran on from that
without any further inquiry as to my trouble.
His utterances roved wide and loose.
"The reality of life, my dear Ponderevo," I remember him saying very
impressively and punctuating with the nut-crackers as he spoke, "is
Chromatic Conflict ... and Form. Get hold of that and let all these
other questions go.
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