up stalks that
only led them into air. On the fragile curve of a feathery bent a pair
of Spotted Burnet moths were at their mating--lovely creatures of the
iridescent green of lapis-lazuli, their folded wings of greyer green
decorated with splashes of purest crimson, their long glossy antennae
shining in the sunlight. Immobile they clung together for what must have
been, in their measuring of time, hours of love. Beyond them, on other
grass-stems, orange-hued flies took their pleasure, and the whole air
was quick with the wings of butterflies and moths. The quiet little
circle of turf was athrill with life; the air, the warm soil, the clumps
of bracken whence the hidden crickets shrilled, the pinkish grasses
which bore the tiny interlocked bodies of the mating flies--everything
told of life, life, life. This place seemed an amphitheatre for the
display of the secret of Nature--life, and yet more life, in splendid
prodigality. Ishmael watched and wondered. Was this, then, the blind end
of creation--to create again? If life were only valuable for the
production of more, then what it created was not valuable either, and
the whole thing became an illogical absurdity. There must be some
definite value in each life apart from its reproductive powers, or the
reproductions were better left in the void. Blind pleasure, like blind
working, was not a possible solution to one of his blood and habit of
mind.

Yet he knew as he lay there that not for ever would he be able to go on
as so far he had. He told himself that if it were possible to stamp on
desire now it would continue to be possible; that if one were not put
into the world to get what one wanted at least it should be possible to
grit the teeth on the fact. It was childish enough to cry for the
moon--it was pitiable to hanker after its reflection in a cesspool.
Chastity to Ishmael, by the nature of his training and his
circumstances, was a vital thing; the ever-present miseries of home
resulting from his father's offence, the determination to keep clean
himself and bring clean children to the inheritance, had grown with him.
If he lost it he lost far more than most men, because to him it had been
more.

Not for the first time some words of the Parson's came back to him:
"Casual encounters where no such question arises ..." That seemed to him
more horrible, more unsound, now, as he lay looking at the inevitable
matings of the winged creatures, than ever before; something a