“And she wants you to take her to a night-club, and laughs at you for bein’ shocked, an’ argues about it—no end knowing! And so one takes the cue and follows up—and then half times out of ten she turns on the freezin’ tap, and quite right too, only she ought to have done it from the beginning. And they’ve got quite pally, too, with—well—the other sort. It’s so rum. You meet ’em with their arms round each other’s waists.... It’s all a mix-up an’ you never know where you are or what you’re safe to say, or who knows who or how much you’re let in for——”
“Tim likes to know where a good woman ends and a bad one begins—that’s the trouble in brief, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Timothy answered his host. And drew a long breath ... waiting for enlightenment.
“Keep ’em divided in your own mind, Tim, and it will be all right. The shuffle is mostly intellectual, and needn’t concern you. Your nice girl, because she knows rather more than she used to, believes she can compete with professionals. Mais ce n’est pas son métier—and she’ll discover that in time. Meanwhile, we know where to find our wives and where to find our mistresses; and those who wish to be met on half-way ground, let us meet them on half-way ground. It’s not for us to be pushing them back into innocence or toppling them forward into guilt.” Stevenson lay back with arms crossed behind his head, in his wonted state of unruffled good-humour.
Kennedy, greatly excited, contested this bland point of view: “I object to half-way ground. Strongly. Besides, it’s a form of blacklegging. Give me sharp divisions—sand and rock. Confound it, I don’t want my wife, when I get her, to be able to chatter like a frank comrade about all the ins and outs of my squalid existence before I met her. I hate frank comrades. They’re too—too reasonable altogether. I hate an intellectual mate, and a pure white friend of my little sister Beth, and almost a harlot, all combined, like one of those beastly mechanical book-cases and step-ladder and kitchen-table patent arrangements ... and pull out whichever you want. Conveniences bore me. Subtleties bore me still more. And you can never tell, with these new-fangled girls, just how many degrees they’re still good and how many they’re prepared to be bad. Oh, Lord! Lord!—give me another one, stiff, Pandos.”
“And yet,” remarked Theo Pandos, complying, “I gathered that you were on very excellent terms with our special little group of—what do you call them?—new-fangled girls?”
Cliffe’s features puckered to a gnome-like grin: “Ask ’em. I’m dear old Cliffe—just dear old Cliffe—quite sexless y’know—never been known to love—in—er—that way. It’s funny, but I don’t believe he could....”
Blair Stevenson shrugged his shoulders composedly. “I’m of a grateful nature. What God sends me, I take. And what He refuses me, I refuse to desire. Some people are always returning a gift with requests for alteration.”
Timothy sat listening; his eyes rested seriously on first one speaker and then the other. “Yes,” he said at last; “But what’s it all about? I mean—what are they up to, those girls?”