“People think, because there’s a war on, it ought to reduce the human psychology to a state of beautiful rustic Big Simplicity.... ‘We have no time for minute dissections of idea in these times when——’ Idiots! Windbags! As if war itself—now—were a beautiful rustic simple Big thing. Everything’s complex to a verge of lunacy—it’s the tendency of evolution—war and peace and character and morality—The war hasn’t made a halfpenny-worth of difference—only a khaki embrace gives a fictitious impression of bluff manliness.... Complexity is raging everywhere beneath the surface layer of uniform, just the same—just the same. We’re all victims to it—you, Deb, and I, Deb. And the immediate tormenting question of me and you ... we don’t love each other, do we? You who know too much and have done too little?—do we?”
He rose to his gaunt height, and pressed his large hands on her shoulders, and stood looking down upon her ... she wriggled a trifle uneasily. There was monotony in this procession of negative wooings, and she would have welcomed a change. It might perhaps have been possible to care for Cliffe—if he had not damped her ardour by presupposing the contrary. If he had made love to her ... love, like the threshold of a dim yet familiar garden fresh with the night-breath of drenched petals——
And instead they were ruling her round with geometrical lines and angles—theories! She raised her dragging white eyelids and looked up at him with an intimate appeal for the garden ... the garden back again....
His face grew suddenly stern.
“Go up to bed, child—I’m going for a walk on the Common——”
But he did not remove his hands—till, swooping, he kissed her gently on the forehead. And strode abruptly out of the front door into the dark dripping road.
An uncanny familiarity about his action ... a detached feeling of having once been the spectator—then Deb remembered. She had seen Cliffe treat Antonia in exactly the same way. It was his celebrated Kiss of Renunciation, as performed before all the Crowned Heads of Europe....