little hole
worse than this." He looked distastefully at the age-cracked walls,
stained with patches of damp that seemed like a material form of
disgrace. That she should have grown to beauty in these infect
surroundings made him feel, as he had often done before, that she was
not all human and corruptible, but that her flesh was mixed with
precious substance not subject to decay, her blood interpenetrated with
the material of jewels. Perhaps some sorcerer had confusioned it of
organic and inorganic beauty and chosen some ancestress of Ellen for
his human ingredient; he remembered an African story of a woman
fertilised by a sacred horn of ivory; an Indian story of a princess who
had lain with her narrow brown body straight and still all night before
the altar of a quiet temple, that the rays of a holy ruby might make her
quick; surely their children had met and bred the stock that had at
last, in the wise age of the world, made this thing of rubies and ivory
that lay in his arms. He liked making fantasies about her that were
stiff as brocade with fantastic imagery, that were more worshipful of
her loveliness than anything he yet dared say to her. Absent-mindedly he
went on reassuring her. "You know, I've got quite enough money.
Fortunately the branch of chemistry I'm interested in is of great
commercial use, so I get well paid. Iniquitously well paid, when one
considers how badly pure scientific work is paid; and of course pure
science ought to be rewarded a hundred times better than applied
science. We ought to be able to manage quite decently. My mother's got
her own money, so my income will be all ours. There's no reason of that
sort why we shouldn't get married at once. We'll have to live in Essex
at first. I've got to go and work on Kerith Island."

She wriggled on his lap. "What's that you were saying about science?"
she asked, her voice dipping and soaring with affected interest. "Why
isn't pure science to be rewarded better than applied science?"

"Why is she trying to put me off?" he speculated. "It isn't a matter of
being sure of a decent home. In fact, she hated my talking about money.
I wonder what it is." To let her do what she wanted with the
conversation he said aloud, "Oh, because applied science is a mug's
game. Pure science is a kind of marriage with knowledge--the same kind
of marriage that ours is going to be, when you find out all about a
person by being with them all the time and loving them very