ith Susan! But the really repulsive thing is
that they feel nothing at all--about what I do when I have a hot bath.
They're gross, they're absurd, they're utterly intolerable!"

So saying, and drawing no reply from Hewet, he proceeded to think about
himself, about science, about Cambridge, about the Bar, about Helen and
what she thought of him, until, being very tired, he was nodding off to
sleep.

Suddenly Hewet woke him up.

"How d'you know what you feel, Hirst?"

"Are you in love?" asked Hirst. He put in his eyeglass.

"Don't be a fool," said Hewet.

"Well, I'll sit down and think about it," said Hirst. "One really ought
to. If these people would only think about things, the world would be a
far better place for us all to live in. Are you trying to think?"

That was exactly what Hewet had been doing for the last half-hour, but
he did not find Hirst sympathetic at the moment.

"I shall go for a walk," he said.

"Remember we weren't in bed last night," said Hirst with a prodigious
yawn.

Hewet rose and stretched himself.

"I want to go and get a breath of air," he said.

An unusual feeling had been bothering him all the evening and forbidding
him to settle into any one train of thought. It was precisely as if he
had been in the middle of a talk which interested him profoundly when
some one came up and interrupted him. He could not finish the talk, and
the longer he sat there the more he wanted to finish it. As the talk
that had been interrupted was a talk with Rachel, he had to ask himself
why he felt this, and why he wanted to go on talking to her. Hirst would
merely say that he was in love with her. But he was not in love with
her. Did love begin in that way, with the wish to go on talking? No. It
always began in his case with definite physical sensations, and these
were now absent, he did not even find her physically attractive.
There was something, of course, unusual about her--she was young,
inexperienced, and inquisitive, they had been more open with each other
than was usually possible. He always found girls interesting to talk to,
and surely these were good reasons why he should wish to go on talking
to her; and last night, what with the crowd and the confusion, he had
only been able to begin to talk to her. What was she doing now? Lying on
a sofa and looking at the ceiling, perhaps. He could imagine her doing
that, and Helen in an arm-chair, with her hands on the arm of it,
so--looking ahead of