“I don’t deny, however,” he went on, evidently deriving more and more virtuous satisfaction from his somewhat indecisive rejection of her sacrifice, “that it is a temptation to me. I hate that office so profoundly! You were quite right there, Lacrima. All I said about getting on with those people was damned bluff. I loathe them and they loathe me. It is simply like a kind of death, my life in that place. Yes, what you suggest is a temptation to me. I can’t help feeling rather like that poor brother of the girl in ‘Measure for Measure’ when she comes to say that she could save his life by the loss of her virtue, and he talks about his feelings on the subject of death. She put him down fiercely enough, poor dog! She evidently thought her virtue was much more important than his life. I am glad you are just the opposite of that puritanical young woman. I shouldn’t like you very much if you took her line! “But just because you don’t do that, my dear,” Mr. Quincunx went on, tugging at the obstinate roots of a great dock, “I couldn’t think of letting you sacrifice yourself. If you _were_ like that woman in the play, and made all that damned silly fuss about your confounded virtue, I should be inclined to wish that Mr. Goring had got his hands upon you. Women who think as much of themselves as that, _ought_ to be given over to honest fellows like Mr. Goring. It’s the sort of punishment they deserve for their superstitious selfishness. For it’s all selfishness, of course. We know that well enough!” He flung the defeated weed so vindictively upon his barrow that some of the earth from its roots was sprinkled into Lacrima’s lap. He came to help her brush it away, and took the opportunity to kiss her again,--this time a shade more amorously. “All this business of ‘love,’” he went on, returning to his potatoes, “is nothing but the old eternal wickedness of man’s nature. The only kind of love which is worth anything is the love that gets rid of sex altogether, and becomes calm and quiet and distant--like the love of a planetary spirit. Apart from this love, which is not like human love at all, everything in us is selfish. Even a mother’s care for its child is selfish.” “I shall never have a child,” said Lacrima in a low voice. “I wonder what your friend James Andersen would say to all this,” continued Mr. Quincunx. “Why, by the way, don’t you get _him_ to marry you? He would do it, no doubt, like a shot, if you gave him a little encouragement; and then make you work all day in his kitchen, as his father made his mother, so they say.” Lacrima made a hopeless gesture, and looked at the watch upon her wrist. She began to feel dizzy and sick for want of food. She had had nothing since breakfast, and the shadows were beginning to grow long.