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the same and a stable lad with a yet older and roomier tourer. Decently calculated noticeableness was given to the assemblage by the fact that the whole of it, with the exception of the stable lad, was in that delicate shade of cream known to conservative coach-builders as Queen Anne’s white. And towards it, with the enhanced cheerfulness of travellers who realize that now somebody else is going to pay, moved the group of people who had got off in front.
    ‘You see,’ said Timmy, ‘we print the junction on our notepaper and have people met.’
    ‘But this’, said Mr Eliot, ‘is the through carriage. That’s why I moved along.’
    ‘In about five minutes they’ll back us into the siding.’
    ‘The only trouble is that the heating goes off. But nowadays the wait is only half-an-hour till they hitch us on to a local train.’ Mr Eliot produced a pipe which was almost the twin of Timmy’s. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’
    Winter, who suddenly felt he had been travelling all day, drew his overcoat about him and made an affable noise. Toplady said: ‘Not at all. Are there many stops?’
    ‘Warter,’ said Timmy, ‘King’s Cleeve, and Wing.’
    ‘Low Swaffham,’ said Mr Eliot, ‘Pigg, Little Limber, Snug, Cold Findon, and Rust. It means that by the time we arrive Belinda will have settled them all nicely in.’ He filled his pipe and turned to Winter. ‘I wonder if you happen to have a match? I meant to pick some up in my club.’
     
    ‘Wing,’ said Timmy – and braced himself against the opposite seat. ‘It’s a curious thing about trains, but the slower they go the quicker they stop.’ He pause. ‘Listen – I can still hear the dogs. Those awful women must have had the same idea as ourselves.’
    ‘I’m afraid’, said Mr Eliot, ‘that this is a very tedious train. I wonder if we ought to close the window?’
    Curling and uncurling his toes within his shoes, and finding a satisfactory ambiguity in the ejaculation, Winter said ‘Pigg!’ Mr Eliot rubbed with a glove at the window, saying ‘Pigg?’ as if surprised that they had got so far. And Timmy, chanting ‘Pigg, Pigg, Pigg – oh, Hugo, I must take you to Pigg!’, wriggled on his seat in the obscure enjoyment of some sentiment of childhood.
    Winter felt pervasively numb. He had ceased, against his better knowledge, to believe in any mystery of the Spider, or in the existence of Mrs Birdwire and Lady Pike along the corridor, or even in the enviable crowd and guests who had been conveyed to the Eliot home so much more expeditiously that himself. It was only a little past midday, but interminably the train seemed to have been travelling through an England enfolded in cold, in half-light, and in gloom. ‘No,’ he said, resuming his literary conversation with Mr Eliot and speaking so emphatically that Toplady started. ‘I think that books are a mistake, and that more books are more mistaken still. One’s sole legitimate satisfaction in contemplating the production of literature is in the knowledge that the process has a mathematical limit; that there will come a point, just as there will with music, at which it will be possible to produce only what somebody else has produced before.’
    Mr Eliot knocked out his pipe. ‘That’, he said amiably, ‘is pretty much the position already.’
    ‘But I am speaking exactly. The human vocabulary is limited and can be arranged only in a finite number of ways. The combinations must eventually exhaust themselves. Consider’ – said Winter – ‘an observer from a planet with somewhat different habits from ours prowling about and watching writers at work.’
    Toplady, who plainly thought this an unprofitable thing to consider, reached for The Times .
    ‘Consider this detached observer viewing the ceaseless labour of writers in shuffling and rearranging words. Might be not rationally suppose that this matter of the possible combinations was the end on view?’
    Mr Eliot considered carefully, a light