Dudley was disappointed in him, and unhappy in the way a child may be. It wounded him, that Laurence, like Julia, persisted in excluding him by means of a false pride. "It is a great deal to me that you are ready to be my friend. Julia told me." Dudley's eyes were oppressively gentle. Laurence did not reply at once. He looked about the room. His glance was bright with uneasiness. He pressed tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. His knuckles were white. This visit was an ordeal which the bitterness of his pride had forced him to accept. He wondered what he must do to prevent talk of Julia which he could not endure. "It seems to me it would have been very absurd if I had refused to be your friend." He made his gaze steady as he turned to watch Dudley. Dudley's negligee shirt was open over his chest which was beaded with sweat. His face was flushed and his hair clung darkly to his moist temples. His lips pouted slightly beneath his small glistening mustache. The expression of his eyes suggested a domineering desire for openness. He felt that already through Julia's body he knew Laurence's life. The same virginal pagan quality of pride that had to be overcome in Julia was in Laurence too. Dudley wanted to perpetrate an outrage of compassion upon it. "I realized before Julia told me that there was a side to you altogether different from the one you show to the world." Without knowing how to put an end to his humiliation, Laurence said, "I suppose there is in all of us. You artists have a peculiar advantage in being able to express yourselves." He put a light to his pipe, blew the smoke out, and stared at the ceiling. Whenever Dudley mentioned Julia's name Laurence wanted to repudiate the significance which it held in common for Dudley and himself. Rather than be included here, he preferred to think of Dudley and Julia together and himself as separate. Dudley was wrapt in the conviction of a dark, almost fleshly, knowledge of Laurence, and his determination to love was as ruthless as any hatred. He never had the intimate experience of a personality without wanting, in a sense, to defile it by drawing it utterly to himself. He smiled apologetically. "We should never refuse any experience." Laurence felt as if he were a woman whose body was being taken. He sucked at his dry pipe which was extinguished. "Perhaps it is my limitation which makes it impossible for me to receive everything so unquestioningly." "But you do accept things." "Not emotionally. Not in the way you mean."