Then for a time--perhaps as the result of that slap in the back--Kipps felt decidedly queer, and acting on Chitterlow's advice went for a bit of a freshener upon the Leas. After a time he threw off the temporary queerness and found Chitterlow patting him on the shoulder and telling him that he'd be all right now in a minute and all the better for it--which he was. And the wind having dropped and the night being now a really very beautiful moonlight night indeed, and all before Kipps to spend as he liked and with only a very little tendency to spin round now and again to mar its splendour, they set out to walk the whole length of the Leas to the Sandgate lift and back, and as they walked Chitterlow spoke first of moonlight transfiguring the sea and then of moonlight transfiguring faces, and so at last he came to the topic of Love, and upon that he dwelt a great while, and with a wealth of experience and illustrative anecdote that seemed remarkably pungent and material to Kipps. He forgot his lost Miss Walshingham and his outraged employer again. He became as it were a desperado by reflection. Chitterlow had had adventures, a quite astonishing variety of adventures in this direction; he was a man with a past, a really opulent past, and he certainly seemed to like to look back and see himself amidst its opulence. He made no consecutive history, but he gave Kipps vivid, momentary pictures of relations and entanglements. One moment he was in flight--only too worthily in flight--before the husband of a Malay woman in Cape Town. At the next he was having passionate complications with the daughter of a clergyman in York. Then he passed to a remarkable grouping at Seaford. "They say you can't love two women at once," said Chitterlow. "But I tell you----" He gesticulated and raised his ample voice. "It's _Rot_! _Rot!_" "I know that," said Kipps. "Why, when I was in the smalls with Bessie Hopper's company there were three." He laughed and decided to add, "Not counting Bessie, that is." He set out to reveal Life as it is lived in touring companies, a quite amazing jungle of interwoven "affairs" it appeared to be, a mere amorous winepress for the crushing of hearts. "People say this sort of thing's a nuisance and interferes with Work. I tell you it isn't. The Work couldn't go on without it. They _must_ do it. They haven't the Temperament if they don't. If they hadn't the Temperament they wouldn't want to act, if they have--Bif!" "You're right," said Kipps. "I see that."