“Thank you.”
“Dear old man, don’t gaze at me as if I had you on the rack. I’m trying to help you. I suppose you’ve behaved like a brute to the little girl, over this business?”
“I’m going to break with her, that’s all!” suddenly Sebastian recovered from the temporary paralysis of speech, and, striding about the room, vehemently poured forth his determination: “Yes, I am. We’re not made for each other. She doesn’t understand—anything. And I get hopeless over stupidity; it numbs me. She shouldn’t have done this thing and even now she can’t see why. She doesn’t see why I gave up living at home—nor why the book meant so much to me. It won’t do—it would never do—it must end now, now!... I’m like you, Heron, I must be free of everything, especially of love, the warm, clinging, hampering fingers of love; I’m growing more and more like you——”
“Nonsense; you can’t possibly grow like me, because I’m not there; not permanently. You can grow like your father, or the Albert Memorial, anything fixed and solid,—but you can’t grow like the spot where I stood a minute ago before I began to run.”
“I’m going to break with Letty,” Sebastian repeated doggedly.
“And you think you’re doing a fine thing by it?” Stuart twisted round on the table, and scornfully eyed his young prototype. “It’s rather easy, isn’t it, to break off with love because just at this moment you happen to be fed up with it. There’s no merit in that,—merely self-indulgence again. But try breaking-off with love when you want it most, when it’s fairest, most devilishly alive. Try breaking off, not because you’re annoyed with the girl, childishly pettishly annoyed,—but for the sake of keeping love unsated, and the memory of love like a sword-blade. Break off with love, because self-denial maintaineth the soul lean, and whetteth desire, and—oh, because if you can do that, and also guard your tongue from overmuch cursing when directly afterwards a smug couple dog your footsteps wherever you walk, and perform for your benefit,—then there’s very little else can affect you, ever. You’re master, then. At the height is the time to break with any credit, my lad, not half-way down the slope.”
Sebastian broke in: “But that’s cruel—inhuman—as a god might behave. No man alive would do it.” His heart was beating thickly; he could not tell why.
“Think not?” Stuart rose, stood against the chimney-piece, dropping the ash of his cigarette into the fire. And he said slowly: “I never told you about Peter, did I?”...
Sebastian stormed out of the room, down the stairs, into the hall. The dinner-gong was drowning the house in sound. The postman had just thundered at the door. Sebastian wanted to get away—away from this new brutality of idea which terrified him because he knew it would ultimately overtake him. It was revolting ... revolting, he repeated, smashing behind him the iron gates of the drive,—this deliberate murder of love to which Stuart had just confessed. Revolting in the same way as would have been the sight of a monk engaged in self-laceration. There was nothing splendid about it,—no, nothing at all! between clenched teeth Sebastian thus informed the wet glittering pavements.
And he was going back to Letty, straight back, driven by the fear of what he might have been induced to do to her ... if he were not quite determined to the contrary.