He paused. "Do you see that hand? The hand, I mean, pointing upward,
on the top of a blunted obelisk. Yes. Well, that's what I do for a
living--when I'm not thinking, or drinking, or prowling, or making love,
or pretending I'm trying to be a sculptor without either the money
or the morals for a model. See? And I do those hearts afire and those
pensive angel guardians with the palm of peace. Damned well I do 'em and
damned cheap! I'm a sweated victim, Ponderevo..."

That was the way of it, anyhow. I drank deep of talk that day; we went
into theology, into philosophy; I had my first glimpse of socialism. I
felt as though I had been silent in a silence since I and he had parted.
At the thought of socialism Ewart's moods changed for a time to a sort
of energy. "After all, all this confounded vagueness might be altered.
If you could get men to work together..."

It was a good talk that rambled through all the universe. I thought I
was giving my mind refreshment, but indeed it was dissipation. All sorts
of ideas, even now, carry me back as it were to a fountain-head, to
Waterlow Park and my resuscitated Ewart. There stretches away south
of us long garden slopes and white gravestones and the wide expanse of
London, and somewhere in the picture is a red old wall, sun-warmed, and
a great blaze of Michaelmas daisies set off with late golden sunflowers
and a drift of mottled, blood-red, fallen leaves. It was with me that
day as though I had lifted my head suddenly out of dull and immediate
things and looked at life altogether.... But it played the very devil
with the copying up of my arrears of notes to which I had vowed the
latter half of that day.

After that reunion Ewart and I met much and talked much, and in our
subsequent encounters his monologue was interrupted and I took my share.