I was angry with Juke. He was taking the prudish, conventional point of view. I had never yet been the victim of passion; love between men and women had always rather bored me; it is such a hot, stupid, muddling thing, ail emotion and no thought. Dull, I had always thought it; one of those impulses arranged by nature for her own purposes, but not in the least interesting to the civilised thinking being. Juke had no right to speak as if I were an amorous fool, liable to be bowled over against my better judgment. 'I've told you what I think,' said Juke bluntly. 'I can't do any more. It's your own show.' He took out his watch. 'I've got a Men's Social,' he said, and went. That is so like parsons. Their conversations nearly always have these sudden ends. But I suppose that is not their fault. 5 And, after all, Juke was right. Juke was right. It was love, and I was in it, and so was Jane. Five minutes after Juke left me that night I knew that. I had been in love with Jane for years; perhaps since before the war, only I had never known it. On that Anti-Potter investigation tour I had observed and analysed her, and smiled cynically to myself at the commercial instinct of the Potter twins, the lack of the fineness that distinguished Katherine and Juke. I remembered that; but I remembered, too, how white and round Jane's chin had looked as it pressed against the thymy turf of the cliff where we lay above the sea. All through the war I had seen her at intervals, enjoying life, finding the war a sort of lark, and I had hated her because she didn't care for the death and torture of men, for the possible defeat of her country, or the already achieved economic, moral, and intellectual degradation of the whole of Europe. She had merely profiteered out of it all, and had a good time. I remembered now my anger and my scorn; but I remembered too the squareness and the whiteness of her forehead under her newly-cut hair, that leave when I had first seen it bobbed. I had been moved by desire then without knowing it; I had let Hobart take her, and still not known. The pang I had felt had been bitterness at having lost Jane, not bitterness against Jane for having made a second-rate marriage. But I knew now. Juke's words, in retrospect, were like fire to petrol; I was suddenly all ablaze. In that case Juke was right, and we mustn't go on meeting alone. There might be, as he said, the most ghastly mess. Because I knew now that Jane was in love with me too--a little. We couldn't go on. It was too second-rate. It was anti-social, stupid, uncivilised, all I most hated, to let emotion play the devil with one's reasoned principles and theories. I wasn't going to. It would be sentimental, sloppy--'the world well lost for love,' as in a schoolgirl's favourite novel, a novel by Leila Yorke.