When George, on one of our walks, told me the gist of this conversation with Elizabeth, I was at once more amused and more interested than I allowed him to see. There are certain aspects of peoples’ bodies, certain things they say and do, which not only determine one’s attitude towards them but seem to explain them. And more, in some cases they seem to reveal an epoch. Every one has experience of attraction or repulsion caused by another’s body. For instance, there was once a poet, whose work I admired; but the first time I met him he tried to hold a girl’s hand. I didn’t mind _that_, au contraire. What I minded was the awful spectacle of his large ugly raw-red hand, with knotty fingers and gnawed mourning nails, trying to enclose the washed and chubby hand of my little friend.... I could never read his poems again without thinking of that Mr. Hyde-like hand, the Barrymore film hand of Mr. Hyde.... Now I had a reason for dwelling at some length on these preliminary conversations of George and Elizabeth with George much in the foreground. They seem to explain a great deal, at least to me. They reveal him and at the same time “throw more light” (as the learned say) on the state of mind of a generation of young men who mostly perished in their twenties. As a rule, George was very silent. Like most people who think at all he had very little of the small change of conversation and disliked aimless babbling. But when he was with somebody he liked, he talked. My God, how much he talked! He was passionately interested in ideas, passionately interested in his own reactions to the appearances of things, comparatively little interested in the lives of other people except in a general and abstract way. He noticed in a flash the girl at a party who looked like a Botticelli (people still admired Botticelli in those days and girls lived up to it) but he would never see, for example, the look on the face of the rather plain woman whom one guessed to be in love with the handsome host uxoriously devoted to his new wife. Consequently his talk was all ideas and impressions. He had an almost indecent love of ideas. If you threw George a new idea he caught it with a skilled and grateful snap, like a seal at the Zoo catching a fish jerked at it by the keeper.