on't be sorry for that. I am glad we have fallen in love,
more glad than I have been of anything else in my life, and glad we have
spoken plainly.... Though we have to part. And--"

Her whisper came close to him. "For a whole day yet, all round the clock
twice, you and I have one another."

Miss Seyffert began speaking as soon as she was well within earshot.

"I don't know the name of a single one of these flowers," she cried,
"except the bluebells. Look at this great handful I've gotten!
Springtime in Italy doesn't compare with it, not for a moment."

Section 5

Because Belinda Seyffert was in the dicky behind them with her alert
interest in their emotions all too thinly and obviously veiled, it
seemed more convenient to Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont to talk not
of themselves but of Man and Woman and of that New Age according to the
prophet Martineau, which Sir Richmond had partly described and
mainly invented and ascribed to his departed friend. They talked
anthropologically, philosophically, speculatively, with an absurd
pretence of detachment, they sat side by side in the little car,
scarcely glancing at one another, but side by side and touching each
other, and all the while they were filled with tenderness and love and
hunger for one another.

In the course of a day or so they had touched on nearly every phase in
the growth of Man and Woman from that remote and brutish past which has
left its traces in human bones mingled with the bones of hyaenas and
cave bears beneath the stalagmites of Wookey Hole near Wells. In those
nearly forgotten days the mind of man and woman had been no more than
an evanescent succession of monstrous and infantile imaginations. That
brief journey in the west country had lit up phase after phase in the
long teaching and discipline of man as he had developed depth of memory
and fixity of purpose out of these raw beginnings, through the dreaming
childhood of Avebury and Stonehenge and the crude boyhood of ancient
wars and massacres. Sir Richmond recalled those phases now, and how, as
they had followed one another, man's idea of woman and woman's idea of
man had changed with them, until nowadays in the minds of civilized men
brute desire and possession and a limitless jealousy had become almost
completely overlaid by the desire for fellowship and a free mutual
loyalty. "Overlaid," he said. "The older passions are still there like
the fires in an engine." He invented a saying for Dr. M