“That’s what I started out for, perhaps,” laughed Aaron.

“And now you know it’s all my eye!” Aaron looked at Lilly, unwilling to admit it.  Lilly began to laugh.

“You know it well enough,” he said.  “It’s one of your lost illusions, my boy.  Well, then, what next?  Is it a God you’re after?  Do you want a God you can strive to and attain, through love, and live happy ever after, countless millions of eternities, immortality and all that?  Is this your little dodge?”

Again Aaron looked at Lilly with that odd double look of mockery and unwillingness to give himself away.

“All right then.  You’ve got a love-urge that urges you to God; have you?  Then go and join the Buddhists in Burmah, or the newest fangled Christians in Europe.  Go and stick your head in a bush of Nirvana or spiritual perfection.  Trot off.”

“I won’t,” said Aaron.

“You must.  If you’ve got a love-urge, then give it its fulfilment.”

“I haven’t got a love-urge.”

“You have.  You want to get excited in love.  You want to be carried away in love.  You want to whoosh off in a nice little love whoosh and love yourself.  Don’t deny it.  I know you do.  You want passion to sweep you off on wings of fire till you surpass yourself, and like the swooping eagle swoop right into the sun.  I know you, my love-boy.”

“Not any more—­not any more.  I’ve been had too often,” laughed Aaron.

“Bah, it’s a lesson men never learn.  No matter how sick they make themselves with love, they always rush for more, like a dog to his vomit.”

“Well, what am I to do then, if I’m not to love?” cried Aaron.

“You want to go on, from passion to passion, from ecstasy to ecstasy, from triumph to triumph, till you can whoosh away into glory, beyond yourself, all bonds loosened and happy ever after.  Either that or Nirvana, opposite side of the medal.”

“There’s probably more hate than love in me,” said Aaron.

“That’s the recoil of the same urge.  The anarchist, the criminal, the murderer, he is only the extreme lover acting on the recoil.  But it is love:  only in recoil.  It flies back, the love-urge, and becomes a horror.”

“All right then.  I’m a criminal and a murderer,” said Aaron.

“No, you’re not.  But you’ve a love-urge.  And perhaps on the recoil just now.  But listen to me.  It’s no good thinking the love-urge is the one and only. Niente!  You can whoosh if you like, and get excited and carried away loving a woman, or humanity, or God.  Swoop away in the love direction till you lose yourself.  But that’s where you’re had.  You can’t lose yourself.  You can try.  But you might just as well try to swallow yourself.  You’ll only bite your fingers off in the attempt.  You can’t lose yourself, neither in woman nor humanity nor in God.  You’ve always got yourself on your hands in the end:  and a very raw and jaded and humiliated and nervous-neurasthenic self it is, too, in the end.  A very nasty thing to wake up to is one’s own raw self after an excessive love-whoosh.  Look even at President Wilson:  he love-whooshed for humanity, and found in the end he’d only got a very sorry self on his hands.