Page:The Criterion - Volume 4.djvu/68

 And what was he thinking about? Himself. Himself thinking. Vanity, vanity. Oh, the gloom, the misery of it all!

'Polypheme!'

He pretended not to hear.

'Polypheme!' It was a shout this time.

Gregory slightly overacted the part of one who 1is suddenly aroused from profoundest meditation. He started; blinking, a little dazed, he turned his head.

'Ah, Paxton,' he said. 'Silenus! I hadn't noticed that you were there.'

'Hadn't you?' said the professional drunkard. 'That was damned clever of you. What were you thinking about so picturesquely there?'

'Oh, nothing,' said Gregory, smiling with the modest confusion of the Thinker, caught in the act.

'Just what I imagined,' said Paxton. 'Nothing. Nothing at all. Jesus Christ,' he added, for himself.

Gregory's smile was rather sickly. He averted his face and passed once more into meditation. It seemed, in the circumstances, the best thing he could do. Dreamily, as though unconscious of what he was doing, he emptied his lass.

'Crippen!' he heard the professional drunkard muttering. 'It's like a funeral. Joyless, Joyless.'

'Well, Gregory.'

Gregory did another of his graceful starts, his dazed blinkings. He had been afraid, for a moment, that Spiller was going to respect his meditation and not speak to him. That would have been very embarrassing.

'Spiller!' he exclaimed with delight and astonishment. 'My dear chap.' He shook him heartily by the hand.

Square-faced, with a wide mouth and an immense forehead, framed in copious and curly hair, Spiller looked like a Victorian celebrity. His friends declared that he