nd this,' to all the world. All the world!... I
will!"

Britten rubbed the palm of his hand on the corner of his desk. "That's
all very well, Remington," he said. "You mean to go."

He stopped and began again. "If you didn't know you were in the wrong
you wouldn't be so damned rhetorical. You're in the wrong. It's as plain
to you as it is to me. You're leaving a big work, you're leaving a wife
who trusted you, to go and live with your jolly mistress.... You won't
see you're a statesman that matters, that no single man, maybe, might
come to such influence as you in the next ten years. You're throwing
yourself away and accusing your country of rejecting you."

He swung round upon his swivel at me. "Remington," he said, "have you
forgotten the immense things our movement means?"

I thought. "Perhaps I am rhetorical," I said.

"But the things we might achieve! If you'd only stay now--even now! Oh!
you'd suffer a little socially, but what of that? You'd be able to go
on--perhaps all the better for hostility of the kind you'd get. You
know, Remington--you KNOW."

I thought and went back to his earlier point. "If I am rhetorical,
at any rate it's a living feeling behind it. Yes, I remember all the
implications of our aims--very splendid, very remote. But just now it's
rather like offering to give a freezing man the sunlit Himalayas from
end to end in return for his camp-fire. When you talk of me and my jolly
mistress, it isn't fair. That misrepresents everything. I'm not going
out of this--for delights. That's the sort of thing men like Snuffles
and Keyhole imagine--that excites them! When I think of the things
these creatures think! Ugh! But YOU know better? You know that physical
passion that burns like a fire--ends clean. I'm going for love,
Britten--if I sinned for passion. I'm going, Britten, because when I saw
her the other day she HURT me. She hurt me damnably, Britten.... I've
been a cold man--I've led a rhetorical life--you hit me with that
word!--I put things in a windy way, I know, but what has got hold of
me at last is her pain. She's ill. Don't you understand? She's a sick
thing--a weak thing. She's no more a goddess than I'm a god.... I'm
not in love with her now; I'm RAW with love for her. I feel like a man
that's been flayed. I have been flayed.... You don't begin to imagine
the sort of helpless solicitude.... She's not going to do things easily;
she's ill. Her courage fails.... It's hard to put things wh