him a
favourable sketch of my career.

"Science! And you've worked like that! While I've been potting round
doing odd jobs for stone-masons and people, and trying to get to
sculpture. I've a sort of feeling that the chisel--I began with
painting, Ponderevo, and found I was colour-blind, colour-blind
enough to stop it. I've drawn about and thought about--thought more
particularly. I give myself three days a week as an art student, and the
rest of the time I've a sort of trade that keeps me. And we're still
in the beginning of things, young men starting. Do you remember the
old times at Goudhurst, our doll's-house island, the Retreat of the Ten
Thousand Young Holmes and the rabbits, eh? It's surprising, if you think
of it, to find we are still young. And we used to talk of what we would
be, and we used to talk of love! I suppose you know all about that now,
Ponderevo?"

I finished and hesitated on some vague foolish lie, "No," I said, a
little ashamed of the truth. "Do you? I've been too busy."

"I'm just beginning--just as we were then. Things happen."

He sucked at his pipe for a space and stared at the plaster cast of a
flayed hand that hung on the wall.

"The fact is, Ponderevo, I'm beginning to find life a most extraordinary
queer set-out; the things that pull one, the things that don't. The
wants--This business of sex. It's a net. No end to it, no way out of it,
no sense in it. There are times when women take possession of me, when
my mind is like a painted ceiling at Hampton Court with the pride of
the flesh sprawling all over it. WHY?... And then again sometimes when
I have to encounter a woman, I am overwhelmed by a terror of tantalising
boredom--I fly, I hide, I do anything. You've got your scientific
explanations perhaps; what's Nature and the universe up to in that
matter?"

"It's her way, I gather, of securing the continuity of the species."

"But it doesn't," said Ewart. "That's just it! No. I have succumbed
to--dissipation--down the hill there. Euston Road way. And it was damned
ugly and mean, and I hate having done it. And the continuity of the
species--Lord!... And why does Nature make a man so infernally ready for
drinks? There's no sense in that anyhow." He sat up in bed, to put this
question with the greater earnestness. "And why has she given me a most
violent desire towards sculpture and an equally violent desire to leave
off work directly I begin it, eh?... Let's have some more coffee. I put