I made to assure him that he would find himself in the most polite company, for the Loyalty Club was notable as a relaxation for Government, diplomacy, and princes of the blood. He “hm’d” viciously at that, but set out with me down Curzon Street and through the noisome shadows of Shepherd’s Market. Gerald’s light was on. But now that I was not there to turn it out, when would Gerald’s light not be on? Through the deep cavernous artery of Whitehorse Street we emerged on to Piccadilly, quiet as before the storm that would at any moment break on it from the theatres. Buses, their lights within revealing the seats, fled madly as though from a doomed city. Loitering taxicabs, attracted like moths to a flame by walking silkhats, came near the curb, hung in doubt, loitered on. I wondered whether she would be at the Loyalty. She might. I wondered whether she could have accepted the sacrifice of herself “for purity” without question, without bitterness. She would--that “Chislehurst mind!” Oh, yes, she would have agreed with that idealist’s harshest judgment--indeed, she had agreed with it so completely that she had plucked two words from her heart and given them to the world to whip her with. Boy Fenwick, you could see, had impressed himself like an anchorite’s scourge on the souls of the twins. What was it she had said? “It would be nice to die for purity.” Heavens, but wasn’t she sickened of purity! That pitiful, pitiless moment in the bedroom of the Hôtel Vendôme! The messy kindergarten that men make of love, and call it “romance,” “idealism”! Perhaps Judas was the first idealist--that desperate, exalted betrayal of the body to the soul. They are so certain about their souls, your carnal idealists! Soul, soul, soul! May their punishment be to meet their souls face to face in the afterworld! One could see that boy, a slim pyjama’d figure by the window, a silhouette of cold fire with the ruin of all mankind in his clean eyes, staring through the meretricious dawn of Deauville towards the goal to which he was exalted beyond reason by his disenchantment. He had loved Iris madly.... But they do not love, those men! They torture, and are tortured. They take love as they might take a flower out of a garden, and they torture it because it does not thrive so well in the water of their tears as in the water of God’s good sense. They do not love, those men, they stand in wonder before the power to love that is in them. And theirs the pleasure of a spurious conceit; theirs the pain of a spurious disenchantment. If that boy had loved, he would have turned towards the bed on which she lay, beaten, silenced, a child groping for sense, for pity, for any reasonable thing, and he would have tried to understand, and maybe he would have found the grace to understand, that in her, despite and because of the hungers of the body, there was that frightful humility to an unknown purpose which makes the limitless beauty of some women. But the boy had lit a cigarette....