“That goes without saying.”

“I thought we ought not to go on to be lovers in any way that Would affect you, touch you too closely....  I was sorry—­I had kissed you.”

“Not I. No.  Don’t be sorry for that.  I am glad we have fallen in love, more glad than I have been of anything else in my life, and glad we have spoken plainly....  Though we have to part.  And—­”

Her whisper came close to him.  “For a whole day yet, all round the clock twice, you and I have one another.”

Miss Seyffert began speaking as soon as she was well within earshot.

“I don’t know the name of a single one of these flowers,” she cried, “except the bluebells.  Look at this great handful I’ve gotten!  Springtime in Italy doesn’t compare with it, not for a moment.”

Section 5

Because Belinda Seyffert was in the dicky behind them with her alert interest in their emotions all too thinly and obviously veiled, it seemed more convenient to Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont to talk not of themselves but of Man and Woman and of that New Age according to the prophet Martineau, which Sir Richmond had partly described and mainly invented and ascribed to his departed friend.  They talked anthropologically, philosophically, speculatively, with an absurd pretence of detachment, they sat side by side in the little car, scarcely glancing at one another, but side by side and touching each other, and all the while they were filled with tenderness and love and hunger for one another.

In the course of a day or so they had touched on nearly every phase in the growth of Man and Woman from that remote and brutish past which has left its traces in human bones mingled with the bones of hyaenas and cave bears beneath the stalagmites of Wookey Hole near Wells.  In those nearly forgotten days the mind of man and woman had been no more than an evanescent succession of monstrous and infantile imaginations.  That brief journey in the west country had lit up phase after phase in the long teaching and discipline of man as he had developed depth of memory and fixity of purpose out of these raw beginnings, through the dreaming childhood of Avebury and Stonehenge and the crude boyhood of ancient wars and massacres.  Sir Richmond recalled those phases now, and how, as they had followed one another, man’s idea of woman and woman’s idea of man had changed with them, until nowadays in the minds of civilized men brute desire and possession and a limitless jealousy had become almost completely overlaid by the desire for fellowship and a free mutual loyalty.  “Overlaid,” he said.  “The older passions are still there like the fires in an engine.”  He invented a saying for Dr. Martineau that the Man in us to-day was still the old man of Palaeolithic times, with his will, his wrath against the universe increased rather than diminished.  If to-day he ceases to crack his brother’s bones and rape and bully his womenkind, it is because he has grown up to a greater game and means to crack this world and feed upon its marrow and wrench their secrets from the stars.