“Age,” meditated Ivor gravely, “can’t matter in a man. I haven’t as yet the faintest idea what does matter in a man, but I’m sure age doesn’t. Consider how many children of ten are their father’s ancestors! Read Mrs. Besant. Read the late Mrs. Blavatsky. Read the late Mrs. Eddy. Read what you like....”
“When,” said Trevor gently, “you have finished gloating over your superficial knowledge of the indoor activities of elderly widows, two of whom are now quite old enough to know better, you may let me suggest that the spirit in which you and I meet at these parties is one of Looking for Something. But the difference is that I know what I’m looking for and you don’t.”
“I always was a backward boy,” lamented Ivor.
“Not at all!” said Trevor quickly, and took another macaroon; whenever Gerald Trevor took another macaroon you were warned—run away, or stay and listen. “It’s I who am the fool! Don’t you see, Ivor? You’ve got a right to begin, but I’m a fool to repeat things. You are searching for an enchantment, but I’m waiting for a repetition. Life is empty at the moment, and I want to fill it again—and the same thing will fill it again in almost the same way. It always does.”
“I know now,” said Trevor, “so much about women that I know no woman has ever loved me, nor can ever love me, as I want to be loved. I say that in no spirit of false modesty, Ivor, but judicially—and the frightfully funny part of it is that it’s not just a remark over a glass of wine, it’s true. I’m the legendary man who was born to be the perfect co-respondent, but has failed to live up to the promise of his birth....”
People were crowding round about, they flowed to and ebbed from Hebblethwaite’s kingdom; they sat at the various tables scattered about the supper-room, and the two men were casually interrupted, but nothing could distract Gerald Trevor from his rare mood of self-revelation. This young man, Ivor Marlay, with his attentive eyes under those sceptical-looking eyebrows, called up a mood of intimacy in the man of middle years which would have outraged him if applied by some one else to himself. He admitted, now, the outrageousness of his mood to Ivor, comically pleading Ivor as his excuse. (Hebblethwaite had placed a bottle before them, from which they automatically filled their glasses.)
“You’re so outrageous yourself, you see,” Trevor accused him, with that jerky little smile. “You goad me on! Not with the things you say, of course, but with the things you understand—or pretend to, anyway.”
“All my life,” Trevor said, “I’ve loathed men. And effeminate men worst of all, for that’s adding insult to injury. Yes, I’ve loathed men—they are, mentally, either too hairy or not hairy enough, and physically they are almost as deplorable as women. Taking, however, a liberal view of the flaws which are present in even the loveliest of the daughters of Eve, I have been partial to women, I have loved women. Sacredly, you’d never believe how sacredly—for one’s manner of speech rather hides the sacred things in one. Only to realise the other day that the only two women I’ve ever really loved were both harlots. Mentally, I mean, not financially....” And Gerald Trevor fell silent.
“That,” said Ivor sincerely, “must have been a great disappointment to you.” He had to say something.
Trevor emptied his glass. “That’s why I’m rather indecently telling you about it, Ivor,” he apologised, self-consciously. “They were both, don’t you see, so fiendishly complicated in their emotions and so direct in their direction—which, stripped of all the baubles of polite speech, was from one man’s bed to another. They talked of love, but they only desired. Damn it, that sounds dramatic....”