"Yes. If you love Cecily, she demands the whole of your life. Every bit of it. She consumes you.... Oh, I know this sounds like a penny dreadful, Quinny, but it's true. I've asked her to run away with me, but she won't come. She says she hates scandal and she likes her social position. My God, I feel sick when I see Jimphy with her ... like a damned big lobster putting his ... his claws about her. He isn't a bad fellow in his silly way, but I can't stand him as Cecily's husband!" "I know what you mean," said Henry. "I thought that if Cecily and I were to go away together, we could get our lives into some sort of perspective, and then I could go on with my work and have her as well, but she won't go away with me. She wants me to hang around, being her lover ... and I can't do that, Quinny. It's mean and furtive, and I hate that. You're always listening for some one coming ... a servant or the husband or some one ... and I can't stand that. If I love a woman, I love her, and I don't want to spend part of my life in pretending that I don't. I loathe myself when I have to change the talk suddenly or move away when a door opens.... Do you understand, Quinny?" Henry nodded his head, but did not speak. "Once when I'd been begging Cecily to go away with me, Jimphy walked into the room ... and I had to pretend to be talking about some nasturtiums that Cecily had grown. I felt like a cad. That's what's rotten about loving another man's wife. It's the treachery of the thing, the pretending.... I've often wondered why it is that love of that sort seems so romantic and splendid in books and so damnably mean when it comes into the Divorce Court ... but when I met Cecily I knew why ... it's because of the treachery and the deceit. I used to think that it was beautiful in books because artists were able to see the hidden beauty, and ugly in the Divorce Court because ordinary people only saw the surface things ... but I'm not sure now." He stopped speaking, but Henry did not speak instead. He did not know what to say; he felt indeed that there was nothing to be said, that he must simply listen. He watched the electric signs on the other side of the river as they spelt out the virtues of Someone's Teas and Another's Whisky, and wondered how long it would be before Gilbert said something else. He was beginning to be bored by the business, and he felt sleepy. He was jealous too, when he thought that Gilbert had kissed Cecily and had been held in her beautiful arms.... "Cecily doesn't mind about the shabbiness of it," he heard Gilbert saying. "We've talked about that, and she says it doesn't matter a bit. All that matters to her is that she shan't be found out ... too publicly anyhow! She called me a prig when I said that I was afraid of tainting my work...." "Tainting your work?"