“There’s a whole world besides this little gang of Europeans.  Except, dear God, that they’ve exterminated all the peoples worth knowing.  I can’t do with folk who teem by the billion, like the Chinese and Japs and orientals altogether.  Only vermin teem by the billion.  Higher types breed slower.  I would have loved the Aztecs and the Red Indians.  I KNOW they hold the element in life which I am looking for—­they had living pride.  Not like the flea-bitten Asiatics—­even niggers are better than Asiatics, though they are wallowers—­the American races—­ and the South Sea Islanders—­the Marquesans, the Maori blood.  That was the true blood.  It wasn’t frightened.  All the rest are craven—­ Europeans, Asiatics, Africans—­everyone at his own individual quick craven and cringing:  only conceited in the mass, the mob.  How I hate them:  the mass-bullies, the individual Judases.

“Well, if one will be a Jesus he must expect his Judas.  That’s why Abraham Lincoln gets shot.  A Jesus makes a Judas inevitable.  A man should remain himself, not try to spread himself over humanity.  He should pivot himself on his own pride.

“I suppose really I ought to have packed this Aaron off to the hospital.  Instead of which here am I rubbing him with oil to rub the life into him.  And I KNOW he’ll bite me, like a warmed snake, the moment he recovers.  And Tanny will say ‘Quite right, too,’ I shouldn’t have been so intimate.  No, I should have left it to mechanical doctors and nurses.

“So I should.  Everything to its own.  And Aaron belongs to this little system, and Jim is waiting to be psychoanalysed, and Tanny is waiting for her own glorification.

“All right, Aaron.  Last time I break my bread for anybody, this is.  So get better, my flautist, so that I can go away.

“It was easy for the Red Indians and the Others to take their hook into death.  They might have stayed a bit longer to help one to defy the white masses.

“I’ll make some tea—­”

Lilly rose softly and went across to the fire.  He had to cross a landing to a sort of little lavatory, with a sink and a tap, for water.  The clerks peeped out at him from an adjoining office and nodded.  He nodded, and disappeared from their sight as quickly as possible, with his kettle.  His dark eyes were quick, his dark hair was untidy, there was something silent and withheld about him.  People could never approach him quite ordinarily.

He put on the kettle, and quietly set cups and plates on a tray.  The room was clean and cosy and pleasant.  He did the cleaning himself, and was as efficient and inobtrusive a housewife as any woman.  While the kettle boiled, he sat darning the socks which he had taken off Aaron’s feet when the flautist arrived, and which he had washed.  He preferred that no outsider should see him doing these things.  Yet he preferred also to do them himself, so that he should be independent of outside aid.