He had seen his father's point quite steadily and clearly a minute ago; but when he thought of Poppy his brain began to turn round and round again.

He gripped his forehead harder still, to stop it.
His thinking drifted into a kind of moody metaphysics instead of concentrating itself on the matter in hand.

"It takes a poet," he said to himself, "to create a world, and this world would disgrace a Junior Journalist." Was it, he wondered, the last effort of a cycle of transcendental decadence, melancholy, sophisticated?
Or was it a cruel young jest flung off in the barbarous spring-time of creative energy?
Either way it chiefly impressed him with its imbecility.

He saw through it.

He saw through most things, Himself included.