"Fancy a mother behaving like that!" Philip wondered.
"That's just what I mean! The woman behaved perfectly naturally. Parents only keep their children because other people do. They're not really interested in children. My parents are not interested in me and I'm not fearfully interested in them. It's only a sort of crust of habit, and the parents of this child wouldn't allow it to form. John Smith and Mary Brown, let's call them. I declare that John Smith and Mary Brown are just natural and sensible people—they had their fling—Body, Sex! That's to-night's party and John Smith and Edie and the baby in the cradle all reduced to their elements! Body, Sex! It's as simple as an equation in Algebra!" (Alec invariably ended his ratiocinations with a flick of the fingers—a 'so easy, you know'!)
The incident had filled Harry with nausea. The disillusionment at the party, the check to his pride it had involved, the callous abandonment of the child in the bare croft, had combined to produce in him an indignation of cynicism.
"You're right!" he declared. "It's Sex, pure and simple! It's all dirt!"
"And you, Philip?"
"What do I know about it? Go on!"
Philip listened, fascinated and repelled. At least the philosophy of Segal offered a coherent explanation of to-night and the other nights. The whole theme was virgin to him, but the method of attack was so deadly calm, so impersonal, that he was impelled to follow. He was conscious, moreover, that other people, not least Harry and Alec, did not exclude this branch of life from their horizon; why, then, should he? It was all so different from the filth of Angel Street; here, if soul played no part or little in this interpretation, mind at least was not absent. There was, he did not dare to confess to himself, a quaint furtive pleasure in it all....
"Go on!" he said, breathless to advance, and half-inclined to flee.
Alec Segal talked. For one hour, two hours, they paced from corner to dark corner of Chester Street. There were but few interruptions from Harry and none from Philip. Only, as Alec talked, Philip felt sometimes that he would like to lie down on the cold kerb to cry—simply, childishly, to cry. And he felt creeping round him like a mist, a deadlier loneliness than had ever beset his heart, a loneliness that now crept and eddied through his being in chill wisps. Oh for the brown eyes of his mother, so innocent and so wide with knowledge! For the bloom was fading from the world; the freshness was passing away. Friendship was passing away. Hitherto he had stood alone, self-sufficient. Now the new preoccupations must assail him, wean him from his old friends. Wean him, oh sorrowful, oh, surely false, from his mother! Lead him towards insubstantial things waiting somewhere to hold him! And these things reached towards his friends, were interposed between them and him. They had been complete and single once, these friends, despite all the flaws in their unity. They were but provisional and dependent now, as he was himself to be henceforward. Pain which had a core of delight, delight which was gilded dust!
The three youths parted. As they moved in different ways, night, it seemed to Philip, engulfed them separately bringing unbridgeable division. Night swallowed something of boyhood. Manhood came stalking towards Philip out of the vast. Manhood placed a finger on his young forehead. A sad boy slept that night in Angel Street, sad and wise.