Ambrose smiled as he thought of Blackwood in his cabin, striving to hide from life and desire. Blackwood, a too sensitive man, found the strain of life in an industrial society more than he could bear. Also, he was not successful in achieving his somewhat exquisite desires. He failed, for example, with women. Unlike Fulke Arnott, he took no consolation from dreaming of a perfect world. Fulke was for changing his surroundings; Blackwood, on the other hand, had convinced himself that there never can be happiness for anyone, and he found this belief sustaining. He had therefore embraced what he understood to be the pure doctrine of Indian Buddhism, and spent his time dodging existence by a method of protective mimicry, in which he imitated the appearance of Nothing. He had resigned the position of physiological adviser in Lord Sombrewater’s therapeutic apparatus department, and now lived in a cottage and occupied himself with the technique of self-destruction. But, as he was soon miserably to learn, he had the processes without the reality; the form quite without the inspiration. “Quentin, I imagine, is not in a trance?” Ambrose queried. “Quentin!” Fulke’s brow blackened. “With Lychnis and Ruby for certain. Showing off his bushy beard and his princely figure in the light of the moon. The libertine! The outsize, libidinous, bearded rat!” “One would not describe him as a rat. There is something too royal and magnanimous about him.” “Oh, no doubt. He has a royal air. And ruddy cheeks. And fine red lips. And a chest like a beechtree. And the legs of Ulysses. And arms that hug. The sort of man that young girls dream of.” “It cannot be denied that he is a refined scholar.” “You don’t grudge him his successes. Nor do I, you fish! In that realm of endeavour you only have to try and you are successful. But they don’t know, poor innocents, how deceptive size is. It’s the promise that attracts them. The performance is apt to be disappointing.” “You are warm. And—may I say?—there is a certain odd discrepancy between your declared views on sex purity and the somewhat promiscuous and even sordid habits of your imagination in that regard.”