"You always had a way of making the unnatural seem perfectly natural and ordinary."
"What forms your opinion on what is 'natural'?" asked Ferlle, abruptly.
His brain groped around in the dark awhile before he found an answer.
"There is a daimon in every man," he insisted in low tones, speaking more to himself than to her, "which forces upon him the knowledge when a thing is not Right, even though it may be Natural."
And then, that very daimon, thus invoked, spoke to him in the ensuing silence.
The same child who had fallen asleep on his shoulder in the past was beside him now, expectant of the same "crystallized apricot" of comfort. Let him take heed that it was such comfort as healed and did not merely drug. What, for all her dreams, could she have grasped of the Powers which spin the dice for good or evil? Eighteen to thirty-nine! Supposing he yielded to this childish defiance of the Unwritten Law and anyone came to know? He got up and crossing to the window, flung it wide. The roar of London traffic rushed upwards on the rising wind. He stood, his profile directed at the struggling smoke-befogged stars; his shoulders, so moulded to desk-work, a little bowed. Far below him, the haunches of a large black draught-horse lumbered towards a mews. Its heavy deliberation touched a chord of memory: a fragment of verse—Yeats, wasn't it?—assailed him in warning.
"The years like great black oxen plough the land, While God the Ploughman gathers in" ... Gathers in ... Gathers in ... The grain?
There had been a clever fantastical novel he believed written round the theme, and he had seen it filmed.
Someone in it had found the long-desired elixir of Youth.
At the time this had not seemed impossible, but now ... "While God, the Ploughman..." Anyway, He did not hold back the great black oxen. The inexorable ploughing, sowing and garnering must go on. Eighteen to thirty-nine. How possible to take advantage of Ferlie's crystal faith and unanalysed affection? If her words veiled the faint suggestion that her need of him was as great as his need of her—wonderingly, reverently, he repeated it to himself, "his need of her"—he must pretend, for the present at any rate, that he did not hear it. He must be just to her Youth, that glorious jewel of Life which she wore with such careless indifference.