in the beginning of things, young men starting. Do you remember the
old times at Goudhurst, our doll's-house island, the Retreat of the Ten
Thousand Young Holmes and the rabbits, eh? It's surprising, if you think
of it, to find we are still young. And we used to talk of what we would
be, and we used to talk of love! I suppose you know all about that now,
Ponderevo?"

I finished and hesitated on some vague foolish lie, "No," I said, a
little ashamed of the truth. "Do you? I've been too busy."

"I'm just beginning--just as we were then. Things happen."

He sucked at his pipe for a space and stared at the plaster cast of a
flayed hand that hung on the wall.

"The fact is, Ponderevo, I'm beginning to find life a most extraordinary
queer set-out; the things that pull one, the things that don't. The
wants--This business of sex. It's a net. No end to it, no way out of it,
no sense in it. There are times when women take possession of me, when
my mind is like a painted ceiling at Hampton Court with the pride of
the flesh sprawling all over it. WHY?... And then again sometimes when
I have to encounter a woman, I am overwhelmed by a terror of tantalising
boredom--I fly, I hide, I do anything. You've got your scientific
explanations perhaps; what's Nature and the universe up to in that
matter?"

"It's her way, I gather, of securing the continuity of the species."

"But it doesn't," said Ewart. "That's just it! No. I have succumbed
to--dissipation--down the hill there. Euston Road way. And it was damned