“When I was much younger,” he seriously told her, “I had a beast. I’ve almost got over it now. The beast in my life was Other People. I resented them....”
She looked, in the darkness, like a figure made of furs and thought.
“I meant,” she said at last, “a personal beast. A beast, you know, with a face and arms and legs. A face that’s always there, in one’s life....”
“I suppose,” she said, “that you’ve loved sanely ... knowing more or less what and why you were loving. Or probably you haven’t loved, you’ve just liked people very much.”
He didn’t answer that. There was no special answer to make, except that he hadn’t loved or liked often; and then one would have to qualify that....
“That’s why, maybe, you have never had a beast in your inner life, Ivor. You are lucky, I do think....”
Her voice was making no appeal; it was just her voice of daylight undressed by the virtue in the night. But the way of her words was intensely pathetic, and he intensely felt the pathos of her in that moment, a dark moment. That pitifulness again! He seemed to understand things about this Virginia.... And she went on softly:—
“I’d like to draw a beast for you, Ivor, so that you could understand. But it’s difficult, so entirely a thing of feelings. You know? It’s just hell in the fourth dimension, and how can one explain that?”
“I know,” he said.
“But one loved the beast, Ivor! Oh, yes, frightfully! That’s why he’s so real, so awfully there....” He saw the white of her hand as she made a sudden gesture. “He’s so fine, don’t you see? In a conventional way, if you like, but still.... The blond beast of devilish philosophies maybe, Ivor! And he entered one’s life and swept one up, so airily! If only Ouida had been alive to see his type! He came, you see, as something quite strange—a man among the weaklings of my life with Hector Sardon. Oh, I seem to have known so many weaklings! Poor, poor Hector! Ah, you never saw me all that time, Ivor. It was a terrible time, terrible—and so rotten! But you probably guess.... And the beast came during the worst of it, when I couldn’t hold out against it all any more, not alone.... A lovely man the beast was, Ivor, and not at all the fool he mockingly pretends to be. Oh, no, not a fool at all! And so fresh and weathered and solid.... With him I felt the earth under my feet again, good old English earth in all its immense and lovely solidity. I thought I felt that, anyway, for it was only an illusion that he gaily mocked into me....”