"You talk as if you believed all that: it's queer damned queer. A boy kissing a girl in the moonlight and you call it love and poetry and romance. But you know as well as I do it isn't. It's just a flicker of the body, it will be cold, dead, this time next year." He had stopped but nobody spoke and then he continued slowly, almost sadly: "We're old men and middle-aged men, aren't we? We've all done that. We remember how we kissed like that in the moonlight or no light at all. It was pleasant; Lord, I'm not denying that--but some of us are married and some of us aren't. We're middle-aged--well, think of your wives, think of--" he stopped again. I looked round. The others were moving uneasily. It was this kind of thing that people didn't like in Jessop. He spoke again. "It's you novelists who're responsible, you know. You've made a world in which every one is always falling in love--but it's not this world. Here it's the flicker of the body. "I don't say there isn't such a thing. There is. I've seen it, but it's rare, as rare as--as--a perfect horse, an Arab once said to me. The real thing, it's too queer to be anything but the rarest; it's the queerest thing in the world. Think of it for a moment, chucking out of your mind all this business of kisses and moonlight and marriages. A miserable tailless ape buzzed round through space on this half cold cinder of an earth, a timid bewildered ignorant savage little beast always fighting for bare existence. And suddenly it runs up against another miserable naked tailless ape and immediately everything that it has ever known dies out of its little puddle of a mind, itself, its beastly body, its puny wandering desires, the wretched fight for existence, the whole world. And instead there comes a flame of passion for something in that other naked ape, not for her body or her mind or her soul, but for something beautiful mysterious everlasting--yes that's it the everlasting passion in her which has flamed up in him. He goes buzzing on through space, but he isn't tired or bewildered or ignorant any more; he can see his way now even among the stars. "And that's love, the love which you novelists scatter about so freely. What does it mean? I don't understand it; it's queer beyond anything I've ever struck. It isn't animal--that's the point--or vegetable or mineral. Not one man in ten thousand feels it and not one woman in twenty thousand. How can they? It's a feeling, a passion immense, steady, enduring. But not one person in twenty thousand ever feels anything at all for more than a second, and then it's only a feeble ripple on the smooth surface of their unconsciousness.