“I must.”
“Who's the lady, Billy?”
“I don't know. Venus.”
His little red-brown eye met his friend's defiantly. “So far as I know, it is Venus Anadyomene.” A flash of laughter passed across his face and left it still angrier, still more indecorously defiant. “I like her best, anyhow. I do, indeed. But, Lord! I feel that almost any of them—”
“Tut, tut!” said Benham.
Prothero flushed deeply but stuck to his discourse.
“Wasn't it always your principle, Benham, to look facts in the face? I am not pronouncing an immoral principle. Your manner suggests I am. I am telling you exactly how I feel. That is how I feel. I want—Venus. I don't want her to talk to or anything of that sort.... I have been studying that book, yes, that large, vulgar, red book, all the morning, instead of doing any work. Would you like to see it?... NO!...
“This spring, Benham, I tell you, is driving me mad. It is a peculiarly erotic spring. I cannot sleep, I cannot fix my mind, I cannot attend to ordinary conversation. These feelings, I understand, are by no means peculiar to myself.... No, don't interrupt me, Benham; let me talk now that the spirit of speech is upon me. When you came in you said, 'How are you?' I am telling you how I am. You brought it on yourself. Well—I am—inflamed. I have no strong moral or religious convictions to assist me either to endure or deny this—this urgency. And so why should I deny it? It's one of our chief problems here. The majority of my fellow dons who look at me with secretive faces in hall and court and combination-room are in just the same case as myself. The fever in oneself detects the fever in others. I know their hidden thoughts. Their fishy eyes defy me to challenge their hidden thoughts. Each covers his miserable secret under the cloak of a wholesome manly indifference. A tattered cloak.... Each tries to hide his abandonment to this horrible vice of continence—”
“Billy, what's the matter with you?”
Prothero grimaced impatience. “Shall I NEVER teach you not to be a humbug, Benham?” he screamed, and in screaming became calmer. “Nature taunts me, maddens me. My life is becoming a hell of shame. 'Get out from all these books,' says Nature, 'and serve the Flesh.' The Flesh, Benham. Yes—I insist—the Flesh. Do I look like a pure spirit? Is any man a pure spirit? And here am I at Cambridge like a lark in a cage, with too much port and no Aspasia. Not that I should have liked Aspasia.”