He lay staring at the grass, covered with tiny blossoms of self-heal and rest-harrow:  behind and a hundred feet below him the sea swirled, its deep peacock hue patterned with milky wreaths of foam; half around him reared a semi-circle of pale cliff.  He stared at the miniature forest of blade and leaf beneath his eyes, and could hear faint rustlings as tiny insects thrust their way through it or climbed aimlessly up stalks that only led them into air.  On the fragile curve of a feathery bent a pair of Spotted Burnet moths were at their mating—­lovely creatures of the iridescent green of lapis-lazuli, their folded wings of greyer green decorated with splashes of purest crimson, their long glossy antennae shining in the sunlight.  Immobile they clung together for what must have been, in their measuring of time, hours of love.  Beyond them, on other grass-stems, orange-hued flies took their pleasure, and the whole air was quick with the wings of butterflies and moths.  The quiet little circle of turf was athrill with life; the air, the warm soil, the clumps of bracken whence the hidden crickets shrilled, the pinkish grasses which bore the tiny interlocked bodies of the mating flies—­everything told of life, life, life.  This place seemed an amphitheatre for the display of the secret of Nature—­life, and yet more life, in splendid prodigality.  Ishmael watched and wondered.  Was this, then, the blind end of creation—­to create again?  If life were only valuable for the production of more, then what it created was not valuable either, and the whole thing became an illogical absurdity.  There must be some definite value in each life apart from its reproductive powers, or the reproductions were better left in the void.  Blind pleasure, like blind working, was not a possible solution to one of his blood and habit of mind.

Yet he knew as he lay there that not for ever would he be able to go on as so far he had.  He told himself that if it were possible to stamp on desire now it would continue to be possible; that if one were not put into the world to get what one wanted at least it should be possible to grit the teeth on the fact.  It was childish enough to cry for the moon—­it was pitiable to hanker after its reflection in a cesspool.  Chastity to Ishmael, by the nature of his training and his circumstances, was a vital thing; the ever-present miseries of home resulting from his father’s offence, the determination to keep clean himself and bring clean children to the inheritance, had grown with him.  If he lost it he lost far more than most men, because to him it had been more.

Not for the first time some words of the Parson’s came back to him:  “Casual encounters where no such question arises ...”  That seemed to him more horrible, more unsound, now, as he lay looking at the inevitable matings of the winged creatures, than ever before; something ages old in him revolted at the fruitless squandering.