"Oh, yes, of course," said Septimus.
"And where are the keys?"
"Why Wiggleswick has them," he replied.
Zora drew in her breath. "You don't know how angry you make me. If ever I meet Wiggleswick—"
"Well?"
"I'll talk to him," said Zora with a fine air of menace.
She, on her side, gave him such of her confidences as were meet for masculine ears. Naturally she impressed upon him the fact that his sex was abhorrent to her in all its physical, moral, and spiritual manifestations. Septimus, on thinking the matter over, agreed with her. Memories came back to him of the men with whom he had been intimate. His father, the mechanical man who had cogs instead of corpuscles in his blood, Wiggleswick the undesirable, a few rowdy men on his staircase at Cambridge who had led shocking lives—once making a bonfire of his pyjamas and a brand-new umbrella in the middle of the court—and had since come to early and disastrous ends. His impressions of the sex were distinctly bad. Germs of unutterable depravity, he was sure, lurked somewhere in his own nature.
"You make me feel," said he, "as if I weren't fit to black the boots of Jezebel."
"That's a proper frame of mind," said Zora. "Would you be good and tie this vexatious shoestring?"
The poor fool bent over it in reverent ecstasy, but Zora was only conscious of the reddening of his gills as he stooped.