ne--and yet to keep my head and not play the fool. Why should men
and women lose their attraction for each other just because they marry
and promise loyalty to some one person? They can keep that compact and
yet not shut themselves away from other men and other women. They must
have friends. Life can't be an eternal duet.... And here you come, using
that cant Potterish phrase, "in love," as if love was the sea, or
something definite that you must be in or out of and always know which.'

'The sea--yes,' Juke took me up. 'It's like the sea; it advances and
advances, and you can't stand there and stop it, say "Thus far and no
farther" to it. All you can do is to turn your back upon it and walk
away in time.'

'Well, I'm not going to walk away. There's nothing to walk away from.
I've no intention of behaving in a dishonourable way, and I claim the
right to be friends with Jane. So that's that.'

I was angry with Juke. He was taking the prudish, conventional point of
view. I had never yet been the victim of passion; love between men and
women had always rather bored me; it is such a hot, stupid, muddling
thing, ail emotion and no thought. Dull, I had always thought it; one of
those impulses arranged by nature for her own purposes, but not in the
least interesting to the civilised thinking being. Juke had no right to
speak as if I were an amorous fool, liable to be bowled over against my
better judgment.

'I've told you what I think,' said Juke bluntly. 'I can't do any more.
It's your own show.' He took out his watch. 'I've got a Men's Social,' he
said, and went. That is so like parsons. Their conversations nearly
always have these sudden ends. But I suppose that is not their fault.

5

And, after all, Juke was right. Juke was right. It was love, and I was in
it, and so was Jane. Five minutes after Juke left me that night I knew
that. I had been in love with Jane for years; perhaps since before the
war, only I had never known it. On that Anti-Potter investigation tour I
had observed and analysed her, and smiled cynically to myself at the
commercial instinct of the Potter twins, the lack of the fineness that
distinguished Katherine and Juke. I remembered that; but I remembered,
too, how white and round Jane's chin had looked as it pressed against the
thymy turf of the cliff where we lay above the sea. All through the war I
had seen her at intervals, enjoying life, finding the war a sort of lark,
and I had hated her bec