“Hm!  I see.  Mythology.  That’s made up of tales, and myths, you know.  Like Odin and Thor and those, only those were Scandinavian Mythology.  So it would be absurd to take it too seriously.  But I think, in a way, things like that do harm.  You see,” he explained, “the more beautiful they are the more harm they might do.  We ought always to show virtue and vice in their true colours, and if you look at it from that point of view this is just drunkenness.  That’s rotten; destroys your body and intellect; as I heard a chap say once, it’s an insult to the beasts to call it beastly.  I joined the Blue Ribbon when I was fourteen and I haven’t been sorry for it yet.  No.  Now there’s Vedder; he ‘went off on a bend,’ as he calls it, last night, and even he says this morning it wasn’t worth it.  But let’s read on.”

Again he read, with unresilient movement: 

“I saw Osirian Egypt kneel adown
Before the vine wreath crown! 
  I saw parched Abyssinia rouse and sing
  To the silver cymbals’ ring! 
I saw the whelming vintage hotly pierce
  Old Tartary the fierce! 
Great Brahma from his mystic heaven groans ...”

“Hm!  He was a Buddhist god, Brahma was; mythology again.  As I say, if you take it seriously, it’s just glorifying intoxication.—­But I say; I can hardly see.  Better light the lamp.  We’ll have tea first, then read.  No, you sit still; I’ll get it ready; I know where things are—­”

He rose, crossed to a little cupboard with a sink in it, filled the kettle at the tap, and brought it to the fire.  Then he struck a match and lighted the lamp.

The cheap glass shade was of a foolish corolla shape, clear glass below, shading to pink, and deepening to red at the crimped edge.  It gave a false warmth to the spaces of the room above the level of the mantelpiece, and Ed’s figure, as he turned the regulator, looked from the waist upwards as if he stood within that portion of a spectrum screen that deepens to the band of red.  The bright concentric circles that spread in rings of red on the ceiling were more dimly reduplicated in the old mirror over the mantelpiece; and the wintry eastern light beyond the chimney-hoods seemed suddenly almost to die out.

Bessie, her white neck below the level of the lamp-shade, had taken up the book again; but she was not reading.  She was looking over it at the upper part of the grate.  Presently she spoke.  “I was looking at some of those things this afternoon, at the Museum.”

He was clearing from the table more buckram linings and patterns of paper, numbers of Myra’s Journal and The Delineator.  Already on his way to the cupboard he had put aside a red-bodiced dressmaker’s “shape” of wood and wire.  “What things?” he asked.

“Those you were reading about.  Greek, aren’t they?”

“Oh, the Greek room!...  But those people, Bacchus and those, weren’t people in the ordinary sense.  Gods and goddesses, most of ’em; Bacchus was a god.  That’s what mythology means.  I wish sometimes our course took in Greek literature, but it’s a dead language after all.  German’s more good in modern life.  It would be nice to know everything, but one has to select, you know.  Hallo, I clean forgot; I brought you some grapes, Bessie; here they are, in this bag; we’ll have ’em after tea, what?”