can one?"

"Easily. Come out of it now. Come for a walk, you Pig!"

"It's an infernally warm morning.

"Walk with me to Grantchester."

"We might go by boat. You could row."

"WALK."

"I ought to do these papers."

"You weren't doing them."

"No...."

"Walk with me to Grantchester. All this affliction of yours
is--horrid--and just nothing at all. Come out of it! I want you to come
with me to Russia and about the world. I'm going to leave my wife--"

"Leave your wife!"

"Why not? And I came here hoping to find you clear-headed, and instead
you are in this disgusting state. I've never met anything in my life so
hot and red and shiny and shameless. Come out of it, man! How can one
talk to you?"

10

"You pull things down to your own level," said Benham as they went
through the heat to Grantchester.

"I pull them down to truth," panted Prothero.

"Truth! As though being full of gross appetites was truth, and
discipline and training some sort of falsity!"

"Artificiality. And begetting pride, Benham, begetting a prig's pride."

For a time there was more than the heat of the day between them....

The things that Benham had come down to discuss were thrust into the
background by the impassioned materialism of Prothero.

"I'm not talking of Love," he said, remaining persistently outrageous.
"I'm talking of physical needs. That first. What is the good of
arranging systems of morality and sentiment before you know what is
physically possible....

"But how can one disentangle physical and moral necessities?"

"Then why don't we up and find out?" said Billy.

He had no patience with the secrecy, the ignorance, the emotion that
surrounded these questions. We didn't worship our ancestors when it came
to building bridges or working metals or curing disease or studying our
indigestion, and why should we become breathless or wordless with
awe and terror when it came to this fundamental affair? Why here in
particular should we give way to Holy Fear and stifled submission to
traditional suppressions and the wisdom of the ages? "What is the wisdom
of the ages?" said Prothero. "Think of the corners where that wisdom was
born.... Flea-bitten sages in stone-age hovels.... Wandering wise
man with a rolling eye, a fakir under a tree, a Jewish sheik, an Arab
epileptic...."

"Would you sweep away the experience of mankind?" protested Benham.

The experience of mankind in these matters had always been bitter