He was a knot of circumstances held in a tight but fundamentally unstable equilibrium with all the others with whom he came into contact, who were themselves tight knots of circumstances... That all this was made out of pictures and stories was clear from the appetite for stories and pictures they all shared and the occasionally disproportionate response to a rash word or a phrase which suggested that something vital was at stake. What exactly this vital something was was not clear, but the effects were familiar enough, giving and taking, that his defensiveness seemed prudent. Each other was a flexible distorting mirror to him as he was to them, and if he was allowed to enjoy mugging or twirling his moustaches before one he might grow too convex and return a disfiguring image to the other, failing in reciprocity, bringing on a reversal of the effect. None of this could ever be got right, but that wasn't the point, it was rather that it kept going on, kept being the most absorbing game in town.