Then he plucked Ava Foe from a “dive” in San Francisco, she became Mrs. Burton, and then he had every opportunity for judging the visionary qualities of mental pain. That part was fiendishly well written, the hell that Ava Burton gave him. But young Burton’s ideal of purity was, naturally enough, schoolboy stuff: fine in parts, but stuff. The only part of it that was good was that it was, somehow, purity. On the sexual side young Burton deserved almost all he got from his, one thought, unnecessarily callous young wife. In Ava Foe, I couldn’t help thinking after the coming of the green hat, Gerald had let himself go about Iris. I realised then how he must first have worshipped and then hated his twin sister. What on earth, one wondered, could she have done to him to make him hate her like that? Ava wasn’t in the least like her, of course, but Ava might quite well have been like any sister to any brother who hated her. But this fierce, devilish, mediæval passion--why? Yet I should have guessed something of the reason after Iris had told me that young Burton was “Boy,” Gerald’s hero of before the war. But it never occurred to me to connect Iris’s casually dropped “Boy” with the legendary Boy Fenwick of Careless-Days-Before-the-War fame. He will have his place, that dead Boy Fenwick. A deep place. “Felix Burton’s” idea of what a man should be to live nobly--he was full of those large strivings of Young Men which were in vogue in the Careless-Days-Before-the-War--seemed to take the form of wanting to found a new race of something like potent eunuchs. Young Burton was, of course, without the lusts of the body. Ava Foe wasn’t. Nor did young Burton want any of your waste of time in graceful love-making; he wanted a sort of ruthless companionship, with occasional patches of mating; he did _not_ want to procreate gracefully, but with a sort of furious absent-mindedness. Imagine Ava--Iris! Imagine Gerald himself drawing the woman of his nightmares, that soft possible woman of lonely dreams, detesting her for destroying him ... and for destroying Boy! One wondered, in reading, if Gerald had ever known a woman. The dark knight of purity ... the fallen knight of purity, but how fallen! III I did not see Gerald whilst I was shaking the dust of Shepherd’s Market for ever off my feet, for he was still asleep. I left Shepherd’s Market. The hearty-looking man and the thin wizened man who said “Oi!” and the little bent old man with the blood-shot eyes gave me farewell. That afternoon I snatched a few moments from the arranging of the new place, which was only round the corner, to go round and tell Gerald that his sister had been to see him on an Impulse. I had grown to feel responsible for Gerald: his solitude was somehow like a scar across one’s own life, a rebuke.