Their intercourse encouraged confidential autobiography.  Zora learned the whole of his barren history.  Fatherless, motherless, brotherless, he was alone in the world.  From his father, Sir Erasmus Dix, a well-known engineer, to whose early repression much of Septimus’s timidity was due, he had inherited a modest fortune.  After leaving Cambridge he had wandered aimlessly about Europe.  Now he lived in a little house in Shepherd’s Bush, with a studio or shed at the end of the garden which he used as a laboratory.

“Why Shepherd’s Bush?” asked Zora.

“Wiggleswick likes it,” said he.

“And now he has the whole house to himself?  I suppose he makes himself comfortable in your quarters and drinks your wine and smokes your cigars with his friends.  Did you lock things up?”

“Oh, yes, of course,” said Septimus.

“And where are the keys?”

“Why Wiggleswick has them,” he replied.

Zora drew in her breath.  “You don’t know how angry you make me.  If ever I meet Wiggleswick—­”

“Well?”

“I’ll talk to him,” said Zora with a fine air of menace.

She, on her side, gave him such of her confidences as were meet for masculine ears.  Naturally she impressed upon him the fact that his sex was abhorrent to her in all its physical, moral, and spiritual manifestations.  Septimus, on thinking the matter over, agreed with her.  Memories came back to him of the men with whom he had been intimate.  His father, the mechanical man who had cogs instead of corpuscles in his blood, Wiggleswick the undesirable, a few rowdy men on his staircase at Cambridge who had led shocking lives—­once making a bonfire of his pyjamas and a brand-new umbrella in the middle of the court—­and had since come to early and disastrous ends.  His impressions of the sex were distinctly bad.  Germs of unutterable depravity, he was sure, lurked somewhere in his own nature.

“You make me feel,” said he, “as if I weren’t fit to black the boots of Jezebel.”

“That’s a proper frame of mind,” said Zora.  “Would you be good and tie this vexatious shoestring?”

The poor fool bent over it in reverent ecstasy, but Zora was only conscious of the reddening of his gills as he stooped.

This, to her, was the charm of their intercourse:  that he never presumed upon their intimacy.  When she remembered the prophecy of the Literary Man from London, she laughed at it scornfully.  Here was a man, at any rate, who regarded her beauty unconcerned, and from whose society she derived no emotional experiences.  She felt she could travel safely with him to the end of the earth.

This reflection came to her one morning while Turner, her maid, was brushing her hair.  The corollary followed:  “why not?”

“Turner,” she said, “I’ll soon have seen enough of Monte Carlo.  I must go to Paris.  What do you think of my asking Mr. Dix to come with us?”