"The lamps aren't lit to-night. It's very dark. Do you hear? Stars shining. Wonderful stars. Better than lamps. I say, stars are better than lamps." At length René said: "Yes. Stars are much better than lamps. Lamps are only to prevent people committing a nuisance. Stars don't give a damn if they do." "I quite agree," said Kilner. "Drink this brandy." When he had drunk, René said: "Women ought to be like stars." "Rubbish!" grunted Kilner. "Women ought to be like women." "I've been trying to understand things." "Awful mistake. A fellow like you can't understand things. He can only live them. That's why you have such a rotten time. No power of expression. If only you could write or draw, or play some instrument--though I hate music. But if you could, you wouldn't be you." "You're a clever fellow, Kilner. I wish you'd tell me what's the matter with me." "Too much vitality for a society which dislikes it, as it always will as long as it prefers the shadow to the substance, bad art to good, and imitations of things to the things themselves." René looked disappointed. Kilner patted his hand. "Too intellectual! Personal, then. What's wrong with you, my friend, is that you are out for the grand passion. It doesn't happen more than about once in two hundred years. Why? I don't know. It depends on two people, you see, and I suppose two first-rate people don't often meet. The rest of us lie about our love affairs to make them tolerable. I lied that night when I first met you. I wanted to make an impression. The only reason for lying I ever knew. I told you my one decent love affair lasted for five weeks. It didn't. It lasted for exactly five seconds, the time of the kiss under the almond-tree in which it was born and died. Nothing more was possible, she being she and I being I. It was a decent business because we didn't try to pretend it was anything else. So far as it went, it was so true as to make falseness impossible. We shall both live on that for the rest of our lives. Just enough to make marriage impossible for us. We shall both marry someone else for company, and as a defense against a growing tendency to promiscuity. You don't seem to have that tendency. Life's too serious for you. You are incapable of a love affair without an attempt to make it a spiritual thing. Where we get excited, you get exalted, which is infernally bad luck on the average woman. Feelin' better?" "Yes," said René, "but you do talk a lot of drivel." "Hurray!" cried Kilner. "He's beginning to find himself. I wonder if you'll ever see how funny you are?" "I wonder?" said René, and he turned over, and in one moment was fast asleep. XII SETTLEMENT Our conscious actions are as a drop in the sea as compared with our unconscious ones.