“Tut, tut!” said Benham.

Prothero flushed deeply but stuck to his discourse.

“Wasn’t it always your principle, Benham, to look facts in the face?  I am not pronouncing an immoral principle.  Your manner suggests I am.  I am telling you exactly how I feel.  That is how I feel.  I want—­Venus.  I don’t want her to talk to or anything of that sort. . . .  I have been studying that book, yes, that large, vulgar, red book, all the morning, instead of doing any work.  Would you like to see it? . . .  No! . . .

“This spring, Benham, I tell you, is driving me mad.  It is a peculiarly erotic spring.  I cannot sleep, I cannot fix my mind, I cannot attend to ordinary conversation.  These feelings, I understand, are by no means peculiar to myself. . . .  No, don’t interrupt me, Benham; let me talk now that the spirit of speech is upon me.  When you came in you said, ‘How are you?’ I am telling you how I am.  You brought it on yourself.  Well—­I am—­inflamed.  I have no strong moral or religious convictions to assist me either to endure or deny this—­this urgency.  And so why should I deny it?  It’s one of our chief problems here.  The majority of my fellow dons who look at me with secretive faces in hall and court and combination-room are in just the same case as myself.  The fever in oneself detects the fever in others.  I know their hidden thoughts.  Their fishy eyes defy me to challenge their hidden thoughts.  Each covers his miserable secret under the cloak of a wholesome manly indifference.  A tattered cloak. . . .  Each tries to hide his abandonment to this horrible vice of continence—­”

“Billy, what’s the matter with you?”

Prothero grimaced impatience.  “Shall I never teach you not to be a humbug, Benham?” he screamed, and in screaming became calmer.  “Nature taunts me, maddens me.  My life is becoming a hell of shame.  ‘Get out from all these books,’ says Nature, ‘and serve the Flesh.’  The Flesh, Benham.  Yes—­I insist—­the Flesh.  Do I look like a pure spirit?  Is any man a pure spirit?  And here am I at Cambridge like a lark in a cage, with too much port and no Aspasia.  Not that I should have liked Aspasia.”

“Mutual, perhaps, Billy.”

“Oh! you can sneer!”

“Well, clearly—­Saint Paul is my authority—­it’s marriage, Billy.”

Prothero had walked to the window.  He turned round.

“I can’t marry,” he said.  “The trouble has gone too far.  I’ve lost my nerve in the presence of women.  I don’t like them any more.  They come at one—­done up in a lot of ridiculous clothes, and chattering about all sorts of things that don’t matter. . . .”  He surveyed his friend’s thoughtful attitude.  “I’m getting to hate women, Benham.  I’m beginning now to understand the bitterness of spinsters against men.  I’m beginning to grasp the unkindliness of priests.  The perpetual denial.  To you, happily married, a woman is just a human being.  You can talk to her, like her, you can even admire her calmly; you’ve got, you see, no grudge against her. . . .”