biological mind I saw everything _via_ the body. Biology's a dragon one
has to slay; that's why, in my work, I've taken to psychology instead.
Love-making! I told you, right at the first, I always made love to
women--. I always have done it, and always should have gone on doing it
if I had never met you."

"But why--if you despise it?"

"I wasn't doing it as an end. It was a means. All the adorable,
tender prettiness of love-making leads to physical love inevitably,
and I always thought and hoped and believed that after it I'd arrive
at some Ultima Thule of understanding, of comradeship, of equality.
Never! Ugh, they were soft! Soft flesh, soft spirit, tricky brain!
Sometimes I have a nightmare of trying to get to heaven up mountains of
woman-flesh--soft, scented stuff, sucking one in like quicksands. You're
the only woman I've ever thought much about and not made love to! To you
I couldn't make love--"

"Whatever is this, then?" she asked faintly.

"This is one king coming to another, asking his alliance, his
comradeship! You there, with that man--that jelly thing! You sicken,
nauseate me. It's like seeing a queen go on the streets! Marcella, you
can't do these things, you know. You're letting down your spiritual
caste. You and I--we've been along lower paths. There wasn't really any
disgust in it then, because we were adventuring, finding each other. But
if we go on the lower paths now we're doing a thing that's damnable. All
my life I've waited for the wonder that should come round the corner. So
have you. And here it is, for both of us--"

"How many love affairs did you tell me you had had?" she broke in, in a
queerly casual voice.

"You're not going to be conventionally horrified, are you?"

"No. But I think you're muddled. I think this is satiety, you know."

"It's you who are muddled, Marcella. This is satisfaction, not satiety.
I know I've got all I need in you. Body, mind and spirit. Most of all,
spirit--and courage."

She dropped on to the crackling ground. He looked down at her.

"I don't believe you know anything at all about control, Professor
Kraill," she said very quietly, so quietly that he dropped down beside
her to listen as she kept her face averted. "Do you remember, once, you
said 'Women have no inhibitions'?"

"I was young. And even now, it's true--" he cried.

"I'm a woman. But I've never deliberately wallowed--as you seem to have
done. Once or twice, perhaps--I was sort of weak, or