Sherringham meanwhile asked of his kinsman. He lost no time as they walked together.
"Ah, there's something else you lost by going to Cambridge—you lost Gabriel Nash!"
"He sounds like an Elizabethan dramatist," Sherringham said. "But I haven't lost him, since it appears now that I shall not be able to have you without him."
"Oh, as for that, wait a little. I'm going to try him again, but I don't know how he wears. What I mean is that you have probably lost his freshness. I have an idea he has become conventional, or at any rate serious."
"Bless me, do you call that serious?"
"He used to be so gay. He had a real genius for suggestive paradox. He was a wonderful talker."
"It seems to me he does very well now," said Peter Sherringham.
"Oh, this is nothing. He had great flights of old, very great flights; one saw him rise and rise and turn summersaults in the blue, and wondered how far he could go. He's very intelligent, and I should think it might be interesting to find out what it is that prevents the whole man from being as good as his parts. I mean in case he isn't so good."
"I see you more than suspect that. May it not simply be that he's an ass?"
"That would be the whole—I shall see in time—but it certainly isn't one of the parts. It may be the effect, but it isn't the cause, and it's for the cause that I claim an interest. I imagine you think he's an ass on account of what he said about the theatre, his pronouncing it a coarse art."
