ause she didn't care for the death and torture of
men, for the possible defeat of her country, or the already achieved
economic, moral, and intellectual degradation of the whole of Europe. She
had merely profiteered out of it all, and had a good time. I remembered
now my anger and my scorn; but I remembered too the squareness and the
whiteness of her forehead under her newly-cut hair, that leave when I had
first seen it bobbed.

I had been moved by desire then without knowing it; I had let Hobart take
her, and still not known. The pang I had felt had been bitterness at
having lost Jane, not bitterness against Jane for having made a
second-rate marriage.

But I knew now. Juke's words, in retrospect, were like fire to petrol; I
was suddenly all ablaze.

In that case Juke was right, and we mustn't go on meeting alone. There
might be, as he said, the most ghastly mess. Because I knew now that Jane
was in love with me too--a little.

We couldn't go on. It was too second-rate. It was anti-social, stupid,
uncivilised, all I most hated, to let emotion play the devil with one's
reasoned principles and theories. I wasn't going to. It would be
sentimental, sloppy--'the world well lost for love,' as in a schoolgirl's
favourite novel, a novel by Leila Yorke.

Now there are some loves that the world, important though it is, may be
well lost for--the love of an idea, a principle, a cause, a discovery, a
piece of knowledge or of beauty, perhaps a country; but very certainly
the love of lovers is not among these; it is too common and personal a
thing. I hate the whole tribe of sentimental men and women who, impelled
by the unimaginative fool nature, exalt sexual love above its proper
place in the scheme of things. I wasn't going to do it, or to let the
thing upset my life or Jane's.

6

I kept away from Jane all that week. She rang me up at the office once;
it may have been my fancy that her voice sounded strange, somehow less
assured than usual. It set me wondering about that last lunch and
afternoon together which had roused Juke. Had it roused Jane, too? What
had happened, exactly? How had I spoken and looked? I couldn't remember;
only that I had been glad--very glad--to have Jane back in town again.

I didn't go to the club next Thursday. As it happened, I was
lunching with some one else. So, by Thursday evening, I hadn't seen
Jane for a week.

Wanting company, I went to Katherine's flat after dinner. Katherine had
jus