Free The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams Page A

staying.”
    â€œI’ll ring you up here to-night—say about nine,” Anthony answered. “I shan’t do anything but hang round to-day, and to-morrow we’ll see.”
    So the arrangement was carried out, and on the Saturday afternoon the two young men wandered out on to the Berringer road, as Anthony called it. Past the Tighe house, past the sedate public-house at the next corner, and the little Baptist chapel almost at the end of the town, out between the hedges they went, more silent than usual, more intensely alert in feet and eyes. The sun was hot, June was drawing to a rich close.
    â€œAnd nothing fresh has happened?” Quentin said, after they had for some time exchanged trivialities about nature, the world, philosophy, and art.
    â€œNo,” Anthony murmured thoughtfully, “nothing has happened exactly, unless—I don’t really know if it could be called a happening—but Mr. Tighe has given up entomology.”
    â€œBut I thought he was so keen!” Quentin exclaimed.
    â€œSo he was,” Anthony answered. “That’s what makes it funny. I called on him yesterday—yes, Quentin, I really did call on him —and very tactfully asked him.… O this and that and how he felt. He was sitting in the garden looking at the sky. So he said he felt very well, and I asked him if he had been out after butterflies during the day. He said, ‘O no, I shan’t do that again.’ I suppose I stared or said something or other, because he looked round at me and said, ‘But I’ve nothing to do with them now.’ Then he said, quite sweetly, ‘I can see now they were only an occupation.’ I said: didn’t he think it might be quite a good idea to have an occupation? and he said: yes, he supposed it might be if you needed it, but he didn’t. So then he went on looking at the sky, and I came away.”
    â€œAnd Damaris?” Quentin asked.
    â€œO Damaris seemed all right,” Anthony answered evasively. It was true that, in one sense of the words, Damaris had seemed all right. She had been in a state of extreme irritation with her father, and indeed with everybody. People had been calling—Mrs. Rockbotham to see her, Mr. Foster to see her father; she could get no peace. Time was going by, and she was continually being interrupted, and she had in consequence lost touch with the precise relationship of the theory of Pythagoras about number with certain sayings attributed to Abelard’s master William of Champagne. Nobody seemed to have the least idea of the importance of a correct evaluation of the concentric cultural circles of Hellenic and pre-medieval cosmology. And now if her father were going to hang about the house all day! There appeared to have been a most unpleasant scene that morning between them, when Damaris had been compelled to grasp the fact that Mr. Tighe proposed to abandon practical entomology entirely. She had (Anthony had gathered) asked him what he proposed to do—to which he had replied that there was no need to do anything. She had warned him that she herself must not be interrupted—to which again he had said merely: “No, no, my dear, go on playing, but take care you don’t hurt yourself.” At this Damaris had entirely lost her temper—not that she had said so in so many words, but Anthony quite justly interpreted her ‘I had to speak pretty plainly to him,’ as meaning that.
    In consequence he had not been able to do more than hint very vaguely at Mr. Foster’s theories. Theories which were interesting in Plato became silly when regarded as having anything to do with actual occurrences. Philosophy was a subject—her subject; and it would have been ridiculous to think of her subject as getting out of hand. Or her father, for that matter; only he was.
    Anthony would have been delighted to feel that she was right; she was, of course, right. But he did uneasily