but he searched this surprising gesture as though he were trying to read a signal, till with a quick delight he realised that this was just the final proof of how very much all right she was.  Only a girl so innocent that these allusions to sex had called to her mind no physical presentations whatsoever could have stood there with perked head and made cymbals of her hands.  Evidently she did nothing by halves; her mind was white as her hair was red.

He felt less appalled by this speech now that he saw that it was powerless to wound simplicity, but he still hated it.  It was doing no good, because it was a part of the evil it attacked; for the spirit that makes people talk coarsely about sex is the same spirit that makes men act coarsely to women.  It was not Puritanism at all that would put an end to this squalor and cruelty, but sensuality.  If you taught that these encounters were degrading, then inevitably men treated the women whom they encountered as degraded; but if you claimed that even the most casual love-making was beautiful, and that a woman who yields to a man’s entreaty gave him some space of heaven, then you could insist that he was under an obligation of gratitude to her and must treat her honourably.  That would not only change the character of immorality, but would also diminish it, for men have no taste for multiplying their responsibilities.

Besides, it was true.  These things were very good.  He had half forgotten how good they were.  The meeting became a babble in his ears, a transparency of listening shapes before his eyes....  He was back in Rio; back in youth.  He was waiting with a fever in his blood at that dinner at old Hermes Pessoa’s preposterous house, that was built like—­so far as it was like anything else on earth—­the Villa d’Este mingled with the Alhambra.  The dinner, considered as a matter of food, had come to an end, and for some little time had been a matter of drink; most of the guests had gathered in a circle at the head of the hall round fat old Pessoa, who had sent a servant upstairs for a pair of tartan socks so that he could dance the Highland fling.  He had got up and strolled to the other end of the room, where the great black onyx fireplace climbed out of the light into the layer of gloom which lay beneath the ceiling that here and there dripped stalactites of ornament down into the brightness.  Against the wall on each side of the fireplace there stood six great chairs of cypress wood, padded with red Spanish leather that smelt sweetly and because of its great age was giving off a soft red dust.  These chairs pleased him; they were the only old things in this mad new house, in this mad new society.  He had pulled one out and lain back, feeling rather ill, because he had eaten nothing and his heart was beating violently.  He hated being there, but he had to make sure.  Much rather would he have been out in the gardens, standing beside one of those magnolias, watching the stars travel across the bay.  “Then marriage is right,” he said to himself.  “Where there is real love one wants to go to church first.”