Somehow, a feeling of overwhelming tiredness overspread him, so that for a short moment he felt almost inclined to acquiesce from mere lack of energy to do anything else. He felt sick as he stared at her. Then a curiously detached aloofness came into his attitude; he looked down on the situation a trifle cynically and thought: How dramatic! Something in him wanted to laugh, and something else in him wanted to cry; most of him wanted to kiss her and be comfortable and go to sleep; and nothing at all of him wanted to argue. He wondered just then if such a moment ever came to her as it came to him; a moment when he could have borne philosophically almost any blow, when all human issues seemed engulfed in the passionate desire to be let alone. Yet some part of him that was automatic continued the argument. He pleaded with her, assured her of his deep and true love, poured infinite scorn on Clare and his relations with her, held up to view a rosy future at Lavery's in which he would live with Helen as in one long, idyllic dream. And as he sketched out this beautiful picture, his mind was ironically invaded by another one, which he did not show her, but which he felt to be more true: Lavery's in deep winter-time, with the wind and rain howling round the walls of it, and the bleak shivering corridors, and the desolation of the afternoons, and the cramped hostility of the Masters' Common-Room, and the red-tinted drawing-room at night, all full of shadows and silence and tragic monotony. And all the time he was picturing that in his mind he was telling her of Lavery's with the sun on it, and the jessamine, and the classrooms all full of the sunlit air, and love, like a queen, reigning over it all. The vision forced itself out; Helen saw it, but Speed could not. As he went on pleading with her he became enthusiastic, but it was an artistic enthusiasm; he was captivated by his own skill in persuasion. And whenever, for a moment, this interest in his own artistry waned, there came on him afresh the feeling of deep weariness, and a desire only to rest and sleep and be friends with everybody. At last he persuaded her. It had taken from nine o'clock until midnight. He was utterly tired out when he had finished. Yet there seemed to be no tiredness in her, only a happiness that she could now take and caress him as her own. She could not understand how, now that they had made their reconciliation, he should not be eager to cement it by endearments. Instead of which he lit a cigarette and said that he was hungry.