“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, cough, cough) “You scarlet imbecile.” (I have to water down the increasing richness of his epithets.) “You last diminutive purple embryo of an epileptic stock, do you suppose I don’t know that?  No good?  Of course it’s no good—­yet.  I got to wait for another six months.  And you can take it from me, if a fellow knows what he wants, and doesn’t try to get it—­doesn’t know how to get it—­in six months—­and doesn’t find out—­he’s no good, if you like.”

These words didn’t strike me at the time as having any personal application.  He was to repeat them later on, however, in circumstances which I defy anybody to have foreseen.

* * * * *

I cannot recall the precise phases of their remarkable friendship.  I wasn’t present at its earliest stages.

I had my first intimation of its existence one evening in the winter of nineteen-five, when he dropped in on me to consult me, he said, about a rather delicate matter, in which I gathered there lurked for his inexperience the most frightful pitfalls of offence.  That he should come to me in this spirit was evidence that a certain chastening had been going on in him.