“Gervas Leat shook his head. ‘I don’t disapprove of avant garde. I can’t, for I know nothing about it. But I confess I’m inclined to resent it.’
“‘Resent it?’
“‘Yes. I suspect it of trying to teach me something–to convert me. And I don’t want to be converted. I listen for relaxation, you know. Perhaps I’m not really a musical man. But I don’t want struggle or significance or purpose. I want to be pleased.’
“Richard Wakeley, looking about the room, could agree. It was a good deal earlier than the Adams and the architect had known better than to debauch it with a spurious blue. The walls were the palest of apple greens, the pilasters’ capitals discreetly gilded. It was a lovely room, calm and assured, a room for leisure and for formal good manners. Outside it men wrestled with eternal problems: evil and beauty, sin and solipsism. Sometimes the greater the problem the smaller the man. Enormous, insoluble problems. And quite possibly meaningless. Yes, in this lovely room almost certainly without meaning.”
William Haggard, Venetian Blind