“Isn’t that reality?” says the botanist, almost triumphantly, and leaves me aghast at his triumph.

“That!” I say belatedly. “It’s a thing in a nightmare!”

He shakes his head and smiles — exasperatingly.

I perceive quite abruptly that the botanist and I have reached the limits of our intercourse.

“The world dreams things like that,” I say, “because it suffers from an indigestion of such people as you.”

His low-toned self-complacency, like the faded banner of an obstinate fort, still flies unconquered. And you know, he’s not even a happy man with it all!

For ten seconds or more I am furiously seeking in my mind for a word, for a term of abuse, for one compendious verbal missile that shall smash this man for ever. It has to express total inadequacy of imagination and will, sp............