an mothers. Some of us would concentrate upon a
single passion or a single idea; others overflow with a
miscellaneous--tenderness. Yes,--and you smile! Why spit upon and insult
a miscellaneous tenderness, Benham? Why grin at it? Why try every one
by the standards that suit oneself? We're savages, Benham, shamefaced
savages, still. Shamefaced and persecuting.

"I was angry about sex by seventeen," he went on. "Every year I live I
grow angrier."

His voice rose to a squeal of indignation as he talked.

"Think," he said, "of the amount of thinking and feeling about sex
that is going on in Cambridge this morning. The hundreds out of these
thousands full of it. A vast tank of cerebration. And we put none of it
together; we work nothing out from that but poor little couplings and
casual stories, patchings up of situations, misbehaviours, blunders,
disease, trouble, escapes; and the next generation will start, and the
next generation after that will start with nothing but your wisdom of
the ages, which isn't wisdom at all, which is just awe and funk, taboos
and mystery and the secretive cunning of the savage....

"What I really want to do is my work," said Prothero, going off quite
unexpectedly again. "That is why all this business, this incessant
craving and the shame of it and all makes me so infernally angry...."

11

"There I'm with you," cried Benham, struggling out of the thick torrent
of Prothero's prepossessions. "What we want to do is our work."

He clung to his idea. He raised his voice to prevent Prothero getting
the word again.

"It's this, that you call Work, that I call--what do I call it?--living
the aristocratic life, which takes all the coarse simplicity out of
this business. If it was only submission.... YOU think it is only
submission--giving way.... It isn't only submission. We'd manage sex all
right, we'd be the happy swine our senses would make us, if we didn't
know all the time that there was something else to live for,
something far more important. And different. Absolutely different
and contradictory. So different that it cuts right across all these
considerations. It won't fit in.... I don't know what this other thing
is; it's what I want to talk about with you. But I know that it IS, in
all my bones.... YOU know.... It demands control, it demands continence,
it insists upon disregard."

But the ideas of continence and disregard were unpleasant ideas to
Prothero that day.

"Mankind,