But you can’t describe … but dangerous is not a descriptive adjective … there is a twisted looseness, that describes … that is Saxon … Abendmahl … dangerous, French … the Prince of Wales uses the elegant Norman idiom … dangerous is an idea, the language of ideas. It expresses nothing but an opinion about life … a threat daring you to disagree. Dangerous to what? … Man is a badly made machine … an oculist could improve upon the human eye … and the mind wrong in some way too … logic is a cheap arithmetic. Imagination. What is imagination? Is it his imagination that has found out that mind is loose? Is not imagination mind? It is his imaginative mind. A special kind of mind. But if mind discovers that mind is unreliable, its conclusion is also unreliable. That’s logic … Barbara. All Mind is unreliable. Man is mind, therefore man is unreliable. … Then it is useless to try and know anything … books go on … he has invented imagination. Images. Fabric. But he did not invent dangerous. That is cheek. By this sin fell the angels. Perhaps he is a fallen angel. I was right when I told Eve I had sold my soul to the devil. … “Quite a good afterglow” and then wheeling alertly about to capture and restate some thread … and then later, finding you still looking. “M’yes; a fine … fuliginous … pink … God’s had a strawberry ice for supper” … endless inexhaustible objections … a cold grim scientific world … Alma knew it. In that clear bright house with the satisfying furniture … now let’s all make Buddhas. Let’s see who can make the best Buddha. … Away from them you could forget; but it was going on all the time … somehow ahead of everything else that was going on. … She got up and replaced the book. It was on her shelf; a signed copy; extraordinary. It was an extraordinary privilege. No one else could write books like that; no one else knew so much about everything. Right or wrong it was impossible to give up hearing all he had to say … and they were kind, alive to one’s life in a way other people were not. …
She strolled to the window, finding renewal in the familiar creaking of her floor in the house, here. … She went back across the happy creaking and turned out the gas and came again to the window. The sky was dark