"To me!" said Peter, laughing. "I'm not generally considered the most amusing dog in London----"
"No, you're not," said Miss Proctor. "People don't know you, of course. Lots of them think you dull and conceited. You may be proud, but you're certainly not conceited--and you're not dull."
"No, but seriously, a lot of us have been considering you lately. You see, you're honest--no one would deny that--and you're independent, and even if you're proud you're not so damned proud as Monteith, and you haven't got a literary nursery of admiring pupils. You'd be surprised, though, if you knew how many friends you have got."
"Well, you have. Of course Janet Ross and the others of her kind think you're no good, but those are just the cliques we want to get away from. To cut a long story short, some of us--Gardiner, Morris, Billy Wells, Thompson, Thurtell, and there are others--want you to join us."
"Nothing very definite at the moment. We are going to be apart from all cliques and sets----"
"I see----" interrupted Peter, "be an anti-clique clique."
"Not at all," said Martha Proctor. "We aren't going to call ourselves anything or have meetings in an A.B.C. shop or anything of the kind. It is possible that there--there'll be a paper one day--a jolly kind of paper that will admit any sort of literature if it's good of its kind; not only novels about introspective women and poems about young men's stomachs on a spring morning. I don't know. All we want now is to be a little happier about things in general, to be a little less jealous of writing that isn't quite our kind and, above all, not to be Olympian!"
She banged the table with her hand and the jam-pot jumped. "I hate the Olympians! Damn the Olympians! Self-conscious Olympians are the worst things God ever made . . . I'm a fool, you're not very bright, but we're not Olympian, therefore let's have tea together once or twice a year!"
Soon after that she went. Peter had promised to come to her flat one evening soon and meet some of her friends. She left him in a state of very pleasureable excitement.
He walked up and down his room, lurching a little from leg to leg like a sailor on his deck. Yes, he was awfully pleased--_awfully_ pleased. . . . Somebody wanted him. Somebody thought his opinion worth having.