He looked for a moment as if he were going to rush at me. But the fierceness soon passed, and behind it was the half-truculent doggedness of his earlier mood. "You don't understand," he said, after a pause. "I couldn't expect you to understand. I don't know why I began telling you anything about this at all...." Then he suddenly stood erect and wiped the perspiration from his streaming forehead. "This heat!" he cried, waving his arms. "Oh, for God's sake, let's get out of it--anywhere--_anywhere_." III We went out together into the street. It was nearly two o'clock, and the very slight breeze seemed only to make the night hotter. We walked down Gray's Inn Road and across Holborn and through a labyrinth of alleys and side-streets towards Fleet Street and the river. All the time there was the lightning and the heavy-rolling thunder; the storm would break very soon, and the blackness of the sky was something that could almost be seen. Everything seemed grotesquely unreal, including what he said and what I said. Perhaps we were both possessed; perhaps the whole night was agog with demons and angels, and we, with our problem, were their pitiful sport.... We went on arguing. I told him that if I didn't understand, it was his fault for obscuring everything in a fog of reticence. I had made deductions from what I could see with my eyes, and that was what he must expect other people, including Severn, to do. If these deductions were all wrong, then it was _his_ place to assure and convince me of it. But he said: "No, not at all. If your deductions are wrong, then it's your own fault for having made them." "Will you tell that to Severn, if _his_ deductions are wrong?" "I don't know what I shall tell Severn." "You admit he has some right to object to what's going on?" "As much as a man who boasts of doing what he likes has _any_ right to object to other people doing what they like." He was a shrewder disputant than I had suspected. "Look here, Terry," I said, rather more cordially, "why don't you try to see my point? It isn't just nosiness that's making me ask you all these infernally awkward questions. You know that, or at any rate, you ought to.... It's just what I feel--I have an idea--that you may be on the verge of doing something that you'll afterwards regret. Naturally, I want to warn you--to help you, if I can. But you won't let me get near the subject--you won't even let me know what it is you're going to do." "I'm going to stay in London," he said resolutely. "That's what I'm going to do, and I've been telling you that for the last hour." "But what does it mean? Does it mean that you and Helen----? ... Look here, will you give me your assurance that there's nothing in your relationship but this--this teaching business that you spoke of?" "Which you called highbrow bunkum." "Well, if I did----"