If then a man who's a man wants to have a woman. . . . Damn it, he doesn't! In ten years he had learnt that a Tommie who's a decent fellow. . . . His mind said at one and the same moment, the two lines running one over the other like the two subjects of a fugue:
"Some beguiling virgins with the broken seals of perjury," and:
"Since when we stand side by side, only hands may meet!"
He said:
"But damn it; damn it again! The beastly fellow was wrong! Our hands didn't meet. . . . I don't believe I've shaken hands. . . . I don't believe I've touched the girl . . . in my life. . . . Never once! . . . Not the hand-shaking sort. . . . A nod! . . . A meeting and parting! . . . English, you know . . . But yes, she put her arm over my shoulders. . . . On the bank! . . . On such short acquaintance! I said to myself then . . . Well, we've made up for it since then. Or no! Not made up! . . . Atoned. . . . As Sylvia so aptly put it; at that moment mother was dying. . . ."
He, his conscious self, said:
"But it was probably the drunken brother. . . . You don't beguile virgins with the broken seals of perjury in Kensington High Street at two at night supporting, one on each side, a drunken bluejacket with intermittent legs. . . ."
"Intermittent!" was the word. "Intermittently functioning!"
At one point the boy had broken from them and run with astonishing velocity along the dull wood paving of an immense empty street. When they had caught him up he had been haranguing under black hanging trees, with an Oxford voice, an immobile policeman:
"You're the fellows!" he'd been exclaiming, "who make old England what she is! You keep the peace in our homes! You save us from the vile excesses. . . ."