"By God, but I do love you." A little cry from her (he scarcely heard it), a strong embrace, and there came another kiss, wherein was neither sweetness nor delight, but only a bitter hunger. VIII INTIMACY By hunger sharply sped To grasp at weapons ere he learns their use. SOON René found himself engaged upon an intimacy with Linda Brock--that is to say, he was ever at her command, her constant escort, her listener. She talked of everything, seemed to empty her mind for him. Everything she discussed--the relation of the individual to the race, the race's rights in the individual, childbirth, the upbringing of children, and the position of women. He had not her reading, and was at first fogged by her discourse, her voluble juggling with topics and ideas that could not enter his mind without engendering a certain heat and releasing some emotion. It was not long, however, before he found himself master of her jargon, not long either before she found out how to use it to bring him to a confusion from which there was no issue but by kisses and embraces, and because he kissed and embraced he loved, or believed that he loved. All his unhappiness he ascribed to their necessary separations, and he was persuaded that his soreness could be healed, his dissatisfactions repaired in a future possession. The force of old habit kept his working life intact, and there he was happy and proud to think that in his love there should be so noble a coolness. He tried to explain this to her, and she said: "Yes, of course. You must keep your work separate. Love and fine thinking, you know." He liked the phrase, not knowing it for a quotation; but he never observed that she always set herself to disturb his coolness, and never let him go from her till it was drowned in a flood of warmth. She took him in hand, made him buy clothes, gloves, spats, chose his ties for him and his shirts; discovered that he only wore one shirt a week, and tacitly informed him that two was the irreducible minimum; persuaded him to abolish the parting in his hair and to brush it back; to abandon his straight for winged collars; presented him with gaily-colored socks; lent him books, modern works of fiction and fashionable philosophy; induced him to become a member of the Union, though she could never get him to speak at debates. On her instigation he joined a tennis club in the summer term, proved rather skillful, and was invited by M'Elroy to play for the University second team. Linda was ambitious for him, but she could not make him ambitious, and she failed to develop opinions in him; but always, just as she was despairing of him and on the point of dismissing him from her mind as dull, he would come out with some simple comment that delighted her with its directness and force. Then she would go to Professor Smallman and talk about René, and the Professor would say: "A good sound brain. Nothing unusual except that one feels in him things unroused. No passion."