ran his almighty eye over his army. He loved
them. He loved to feel that his table was pressed down, that it
groaned under their weight. He loved to see the pence, like
innumerable pillars of cloud, standing waiting to lead on into
wildernesses of unopened resource, while the silver, as pillars of
light, should guide the way down the long night of fortune. Their
weight sank sensually into his muscle, and gave him gratification.
The dark redness of bronze, like full-blooded fleas, seemed alive
and pulsing, the silver was magic as if winged.

CHAPTER VII

NATCHA-KEE-TAWARA

Mr. May and Alvina became almost inseparable, and Woodhouse buzzed
with scandal. Woodhouse could not believe that Mr. May was
absolutely final in his horror of any sort of coming-on-ness in a
woman. It could not believe that he was only _so_ fond of Alvina
because she was like a sister to him, poor, lonely, harassed soul
that he was: a pure sister who really hadn't any body. For although
Mr. May was rather fond, in an epicurean way, of his own body, yet
other people's bodies rather made him shudder. So that his grand
utterance on Alvina was: "She's not physical, she's mental."

He even explained to her one day how it was, in his naive fashion.

"There are two kinds of friendships," he said, "physical and mental.
The physical is a thing of the moment. Of cauce you quite _like_ the
individual, you remain quite nice with them, and so on,--to keep the
thing as decent as possible. It _is_ quite decent, so long as you
keep it so. But it is a thing of the moment. Which you know. It may
last a week or two, or a month or two. But you know from the
beginning it is going to end--quite finally--quite soon. You take it
for what it is. But it's so different with the mental friendships.
_They_ are lasting. They are eternal--if anything human (he said
yuman) ever is eternal, ever _can_ be eternal." He pressed his hands
together in an odd cherubic manner. He was quite sincere: if man
ever _can_ be quite sincere.

Alvina was quite content to be one of his mental and eternal
friends, or rather _friendships_--since she existed _in abstractu_
as far as he was concerned. For she did not find him at all
physically moving. Physically he was not there: he was oddly an
absentee. But his naivete roused the serpent's tooth of her bitter
irony.

"And your wife?" she said to him.

"Oh, my wife! Dreadful thought! _There_ I made the great mistake of
trying to find