much all right she was. Only a girl so
innocent that these allusions to sex had called to her mind no physical
presentations whatsoever could have stood there with perked head and
made cymbals of her hands. Evidently she did nothing by halves; her mind
was white as her hair was red.

He felt less appalled by this speech now that he saw that it was
powerless to wound simplicity, but he still hated it. It was doing no
good, because it was a part of the evil it attacked; for the spirit that
makes people talk coarsely about sex is the same spirit that makes men
act coarsely to women. It was not Puritanism at all that would put an
end to this squalor and cruelty, but sensuality. If you taught that
these encounters were degrading, then inevitably men treated the women
whom they encountered as degraded; but if you claimed that even the most
casual love-making was beautiful, and that a woman who yields to a man's
entreaty gave him some space of heaven, then you could insist that he
was under an obligation of gratitude to her and must treat her
honourably. That would not only change the character of immorality, but
would also diminish it, for men have no taste for multiplying their
responsibilities.

Besides, it was true. These things were very good. He had half forgotten
how good they were. The meeting became a babble in his ears, a
transparency of listening shapes before his eyes.... He was back in Rio;
back in youth. He was waiting with a fever in his blood at that dinner
at old Hermes Pessoa's preposterous house, that was built like--so far
as it was like anything else on earth--the Villa d'Este mingled with the
Alhambra. The dinner, considered as a matter of food, had come to an
end, and for some little time had been a matter of drink; most of the
guests had gathered in a circle at the head of the hall round fat old
Pessoa, who had sent a servant upstairs for a pair of tartan socks so
that he could dance the Highland fling. He had got up and strolled to
the other end of the room, where the great black onyx fireplace climbed
out of the light into the layer of gloom which lay beneath the ceiling
that here and there dripped stalactites of ornament down into the
brightness. Against the wall on each side of the fireplace there stood
six great chairs of cypress wood, padded with red Spanish leather that
smelt sweetly and because of its great age was giving off a soft red
dust. These chairs pleased him; they were the only old th