“As soon as you wish to tell me, revolutionary but propriety-observing Fulke. I don’t know if you wish to tell Lychnis as well. That’s her window, you know.” Fulke looked up to her window, and Ambrose saw in the moonlight that his face was all furrowed with desire and despair. He clasped his hands together. “Exquisite—immaculate, goddess-minded,” he whispered, and suddenly tore at his hair. Ambrose drew him off down the road, pondering on the word “immaculate.” The demand of the virgin and ineffective for immaculacy—he would have liked to dwell on that, but it did not seem the right moment. “And what did Lord Sombrewater say?” he asked. “I asked him,” said Fulke, dwelling miserably on the scene, “if I might ask Lychnis to marry me, and he looked at me for about three seconds and said: ‘Why, certainly.’” “I see.” “He summed up my chances in exactly three seconds. ‘Certainly,’ he said. ‘Walk straight in,’ as it were. Tell me, you duplicating jelly, is he right?” “I think so.” “My God! you don’t know how it hurts, Ambrose! You don’t feel pain or anything like that yourself, do you? But I tell you, I suffer. Make a note of it. Make a note that the infernal fluids that the spring disturbs in the blood are hurrying from end to end of me with messages of desire and love. But don’t make the mistake of supposing that I am possessed by mere lust. The sensations of my heart are like the sensations of the opening lilac. I am chaste, and I always have been, and I only desire to worship her, kneeling among spring flowers. She only thinks I am ungainly, I know. But my soul loves all that is pure and virgin and flame-like and verdant and too good and lovely in her for the world. She is just that. She is my Grail, and, in short, chastity is a bloody obsession with me.” Wringing Ambrose by the hand, he plunged away. The moon, Ambrose noted, was now clear of the bamboos, swimming in the shimmering skylake. He continued his meditations. It was not long before the sound of a voice singing came to his ears, and presently Quentin arrived, well satisfied with wine and adventure. He greeted Ambrose mockingly, bowing and shaking himself by the hand. “A custom I have learnt in the neighbourhood, O moon-souled one.” “Can you tell me why it is,” Ambrose asked him, “that a remarkable filthiness of language often goes with an unusual purity of mind?” “You mean Fulke? These revolutionary environment-altering, ideal-state-creating people always seem to suffer from a prolonged adolescence, just as your opposite, return-to-nothing, environment-rejecting Buddhist blokes, like Blackwood, seem to have never had any adolescence at all. Early excess, perhaps, in their case; late excess in the other. How terrible, Ambrose, are the results of a wrongly-timed excess!” “The observation shall be recorded. Don’t wake everyone up when you go in.”