“Well, we can’t all,” I pleaded, “talk by throwing ourselves out of windows. And I was brought up to believe that it was caddish to sneak on a woman, whether for purity or for humbug.” “It was Iris,” said Hilary, “who sneaked on herself.” “Only because, Hilary, she didn’t want the young man to waste such a fine suicide. She didn’t want to do him out of the glory of dying for true-blue manhood. At the age of twenty a girl is justified in having a belief in true-blue manhood. But Mrs. Storm seems to have grown up since then.” Hilary indulged me. I was young. “Of course,” he said, “the boy wasn’t quite sane. Hm. But he loved Iris--you know, extravagantly--as Hector Storm did later. Iris isn’t, it seems, one of those women you love a little. And Boy loved purity. And because, of course, the two simply didn’t go together--the shock, man, of realising that, to a boy in love!--he went on his own way. And I don’t think,” said Hilary, as though he was trying hard to be fair to one, “that we should sneer at the things men die for--even that young madmen die for.” In England, I reflected sulkily, you may not apply the faintest touch of reason to any of the accepted laws of life and death without being accused of sneering. The accusation is invaluable in puissance. It has made England what she is. It at once stops all argument, all nonsense, all sense, all thinking. So powerful is the effect that the one accused, thinking that perhaps he _was_ sneering, at once checks his mind from further thought on that line. The word creates a vacuum. No one likes to be thought he is sneering--when he was merely, for a change, thinking. It is like being told you have no “sense of humour.” It damns you completely, because it makes you damn yourself. And one of the reasons why there can never be a Marxist revolution in England is that the rebels will be told that they are sneering at the King. They will be abashed. “Seldom,” said Hilary thoughtfully, “have I known a man pull his weight less than you are doing this evening. Hm. I should try some brandy.” CHAPTER FOUR: APHRODITE I One chapter can’t reasonably be expected to bear the weight of that night. We have so far built but the groundwork of that night, and on that we have now to shape a peculiar edifice, according to the flimsy but saturnine manner of the third decade of the twentieth century; to which majority the twentieth century has attained, as more austere histories will tell you, only after the most unparalleled pains, retchings, belchings and bellowings; but we, taking a more private course, will be more circumspect in our derangements.