"Well, I make no extra charge for that (said Hapgood, and helped himself to a drink). That's not me. That's Sabre. And if you'd seen him as I saw him, and if you'd heard him as I heard him, you'd have been as impressed as I was impressed instead of lolling there like a surfeited python. I tell you, old Sabre was all pink under his skin, and his eyes shining, and his voice tingling. I tell you, if you were a real painter instead of a base flatterer of bloated and wealthy sitters, and if you'd seen him then, you'd have painted the masterpiece of your age and called it The Visionary. I tell you, old Sabre was fine. He said he'd been thinking all round that sort of stuff for years, and that now, for one reason and another, it was beginning to crystallize in him and take form and substance.
"I asked him, 'What reasons, Sabre?' and he said, 'Oh, I don't know. The war; and being out there; and thinking about the death of an old woman I attended once; and things I picked up from a slip of a girl; and things from a woman I know--oh, all sorts of things, Hapgood; and I tell you what chiefly--loneliness, my God, loneliness....'
"I didn't say anything. What could I say? When a chap suddenly rips a cry out of his heart like that, what the devil can you say if you weigh fourteen stone of solid contentment and look it? You can only feel you weren't meant to hear and try to look as if you hadn't.
"Well, anyway, time came for me to go and I went. Sabre stayed where he was. Would I mind leaving him up there? It was so seldom he got up; and talking with me had brought back old feelings he thought he'd never recapture again, and he was going to see if he couldn't start in and do a bit of writing again. So I pulled out and left him; and that was old Sabre as I saw him two months ago; and one way and another I thought a good deal coming back in the train of what I had seen. Those sort of ideas in his head and that sort of life with his wife. D'you remember my telling you years--oh, years ago--that he looked like a chap who'd lost something and was wondering where he'd put it? Well, the Sabre I left down there two months ago had not only lost it, but knew it was gone for good and all. That was Sabre--except when the pink got under his skin when he got talking.