“Isn’t that reality?” says the botanist¹, almost triumphantly², and leaves me aghast at his triumph.

“That!” I say belatedly. “It’s a thing in a nightmare!”

He shakes his head and smiles — exasperatingly³.

I perceive quite abruptly⁴ that the botanist and I have reached the limits of our intercourse⁵.

“The world dreams things like that,” I say, “because it suffers from an indigestion of such people as you.”

His low-toned self-complacency, like the faded banner of an obstinate⁶ fort, still flies unconquered. And you know, he’s not even a happy man with it all!

For ten seconds or more I am furiously seeking in my mind for a word, for a term of abuse, for one compendious⁷ verbal missile that shall smash this man for ever. It has to express total inadequacy⁸ of imagination and will, spiritual anaemia, dull respectability, gross sentimentality, a cultivated pettiness of heart. . . .

That word will not come. But no other word will do. Indeed the word does not exist. There is nothing with sufficient vituperative⁹ concentration for this moral and intellectual stupidity of educated people. . . .

“Er ——” he begins.

No! I can’t endure him.

With a passionate¹⁰ rapidity of movement, I leave his side, dart

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