Sublime

Briefly Carleton considered the other man, of whom he’d made such a study he might have been appointed professor of Thomas Studies at the University of Essex. He knew, for example, that Thomas was a confirmed bachelor, as they say, never seen in the company of a beautiful young person or a stately older one; that he had about him the melancholy

Perhaps there’ll be a disaster, Carleton had said; and Thomas felt again the blow of the hooded creature fleeing Bethesda with paint on its hands. But that had been no disaster, only something strange and soon forgotten in the order and quiet of his home – so Thomas, who had a gift for self-persuasion, placidly ate a radish.