“We got off at last, we went soaring up into the sky; it was my doing, for I had uttered the wildest words to get her to follow me. I had talked of marriage; Heaven knows what I said. I told her that love was passion and friendship—passion in the secret night, but comradeship in the open places under the sun, and that whereas passion was the drunkenness of love, friendship was its food and clear water and warmth, and bodily health and vigour. I told her that children were to their begetters what flowers are to the gardener: little expanding things with dancing butterflies, sensitive, responsive, satisfying; the crown of life, the assurance of the future, the rhyme of the poem. I told her that in love alone can the poignancy of joy equal the poignancy of sorrow. I told her of that minority that finds its interest in continual change, and of that majority which rests on a deep content, and a great many other things which I do not believe, but which I should wish to believe, and which I should wish all women to believe. I told her all that I had never told a human being before, all that I had, perhaps, checked my tongue from uttering once or twice in my life, because I knew myself to be an inconstant man. I made love by quadruple proxy, not as myself to Ruth Pennistan, or as myself in Leslie Dymock’s name to Ruth Pennistan, or as myself to any named or unnamed woman, but as any man to any woman, and I enjoyed it, because sincerity always carries with it a certain degree of pain, but pure rhetoric carries the pure enjoyment of the creative artist.” I disliked Malory’s cynicism, and I should have disliked it still more had I not suspected that he was not entirely speaking the truth. I was also conscious of boiling rage against the man for being such a fool. “When I had finished,” he went on, “she was trembling like a pool stirred by the wind. “‘You think like that,’ she said, ‘I never heard any one talk like that before.’ “Then I told her a great deal more, about her Spanish heritage and that disturbing blood in her veins, and about Spain, of which she knew next to nothing: that southern Spain was soft and the air full of orange-blossom, but that the north was fierce and arid, and peopled by men who in their dignity and reserve had more in common with the English than with the Latin races to whom they belonged; that as their country had not the kindliness of the English country, so they themselves lacked the kindly English humour, which mocks and smiles and, above all, pities; and that their temper is not swift, but slow like the English temper, but, when roused, ruthless and as little to be checked as a fall of water. I think that for the first time she guessed at a world beyond England, a world inhabited by real men. Before that, Spain and all Europe had been as remote as the stars.”