ess of an agony, a passion, a
self-abandoned nakedness, to the utter shedding of all reticences and
decencies, with nothing but those thin hands and that hair between
me and it.

"I'll work," he said. "I'll work like a hundred bloody niggers. Like ten
hundred thousand million sweated tailors in a stinking cellar. I'll
pinch. I'll skimp and save. I'll deny myself butter. I'll wear celluloid
collars and sell my dress-suit. My God! I'd sell the coat off my back and
the shoes off my feet; I'd sell my own mother's body off her death-bed,
and go without my dinner for nine months to see her again for five
minutes. Just to see her for five minutes. Five (unprintable) little
minutes that another man wouldn't know what to do with, wouldn't use for
tying up a bootlace in."

Pause.

"I didn't know it hurt. I didn't know a girl's face could land you one
like this, and her eyes jab you, and her voice turn round and round in
your stomach like a circular saw. That's what it feels like. Exactly.

"Dry up, you old Geyser, yourself. I'm getting it, not you. You'd spout
if you'd had to sit tight with all the gas in the shop blazing away under
you for the last hour. If you can turn it off at the meter, turn it. I
can't. No, I won't have another cup of tea. And I won't get up and clear
out, I'm going to sit here another five minutes. I'm not well, I tell
you, and it relieves me to talk about it. I don't care if you don't
listen. Or if you do. I'm past caring.

"D'you notice that I didn't speak a word to her--not one blessed word the
whole time? I should have choked if I'd tried to. I didn't want to look
at her, to think of her. That's why I told that rotten story, just to
keep myself going. What a blethering idiot she must have thought me! What
a putrid ass! The sea--And _me_!

"And the way she looked at me--"

I said, "D'you mean to say, Jevons, it didn't happen?"

And he groaned. "Oh, it _happened_ all right. I can't invent things to
save my life.

"God! It isn't even as if she was pretty. I could understand _that_."

He grabbed his throat suddenly and began to cough.

I tried to be kind to him. "Look here," I said, "old chap. I'm awfully
sorry if it takes you this way. But it's no good."

He turned on me coughing and choking. I cannot remember all he said or
half the things he called me, but it was something like this: "You
snivelling defective." (Cough) "You septic idiot." (Cough) "You poisonous
and polluted ass." (Cough,