There was this big harmony in little Minks that he envied. Minks
had an outlet. Sydenham, and even the City, for him were fairyland; a
motor-bus fed his inspiration as surely as a starlit sky; moon always
rhymed with June, and forget with regret. But the inner world of Henry
Rogers was not yet properly connected with the outer. Passage from one
to the other was due to chance, it seemed, not to be effected at will.
Moods determined the sudden journey. He rocked. But for his talks with
little Minks, he might have wrecked.
And the talks with Minks were about--well, he hardly knew what, but
they all played round this map of fairyland he sought to reduce to the
scale of everyday life. They discussed thought, dreams, the
possibility of leaving the body in sleep, the artist temperament, the
source of inspiration as well as the process of the imaginative
faculty that created. They talked even of astronomy. Minks held that
the life of practical, daily work was the bed-rock of all sane
production, yet while preaching this he bubbled over with all the
wild, entrancing theories that were in the air to-day. They were
comical, but never dangerous--did not upset him. They were almost a
form of play.
And his master, listening, found these conversations an outlet somehow
for emotions in himself he could not manage--a scaffolding that
provided outlines for his awakening dreams to build upon.
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