Peter was so interested that he forgot his aversion from confiding in Ames. The subject carried him on.
“Any healthy young man,” Peter generalized, “could be happy and contented with any pretty girl, so far as love-making goes. It doesn’t strike you—as a particularly recondite art, eh? But you’ve got to be in love with each other generally. That’s more difficult. You’ve got to talk together and go about together. In a complicated artificial world. The sort of woman it’s easy and pleasant to make love to, may not be the sort of woman you really think splendid. It’s easier to make love to a woman you don’t particularly respect, who’s good fun, and all that. Which is just the reason why you wouldn’t be tied up with her for ever. No.”
“So we worship the angels and marry the flappers,” said Ames.... “I shan’t do that, anyhow. The fact is, one needs a kind of motherliness in a woman.”
“By making love too serious, we’ve made it not serious enough,” said Peter with oracular profundity, and then in reaction, “Oh! I don’t know.”
“I don’t know,” said Ames.
“Which doesn’t in the least absolve us from the necessity of going on living right away.”
“I shall marry,” said Ames, in a tone of unalterable resolve.
They lapsed into self-centred meditations....
“Why! there’s the coast,” said Ames suddenly. “Quite close, too. Dark. Do you remember, before the war, how the lights of Folkestone used to run along the top there like a necklace of fire?”