'Then, why don't you do a Hubert Price in a book? It would be most
interesting. Do you think you ever will?'

'I don't think so.'

'Why not? Because he is a friend of yours, and you would not like----'

'I never allow my private life to interfere with my literature. No; for
quite other reasons. I admit that he represents physically and mentally a
great deal of the intellectual impotence current in our time. But it would
be difficult, I think, to bring vividly before the reader that tall, thin,
blonde man, with his pale gentle eyes and his insipid mind. I should take
quite a different kind of man as my model.'

'What kind of man?' said Phillips, and the five or six writers and painters
leaned forward to listen to Harding.

'I think I should imagine a man about the medium height. A nice figure,
light, trim, neat. Good-looking, straight nose, eyes bright and
intelligent. I think he would have beard, a very close-cut beard. The turn
of his mind would be metaphysical and poetic--an intense subtility of mind
combined with much order. He would be full of little habits. He would have
note-books of a special kind in which to enter his ideas. The tendency of
his mind would be towards concision, and he would by degrees extend his
desire for concision into the twilight and the night of symbolism.'

'A sort of constipated Browning,' said Phillips.

'Exactly,' said Harding.