“What, to fall in love?” asked Lilly.

“Yes.”

“Then why not leave off trying!  What do you want to poke yourself and prod yourself into love, for?”

“Because I’m DEAD without it.  I’m dead.  I’m dying.”

“Only because you force yourself.  If you drop working yourself up—­”

“I shall die.  I only live when I can fall in love.  Otherwise I’m dying by inches.  Why, man, you don’t know what it was like.  I used to get the most grand feelings—­like a great rush of force, or light—­ a great rush—­right here, as I’ve said, at the solar plexus.  And it would come any time—­anywhere—­no matter where I was.  And then I was all right.

“All right for what?—­for making love?”

“Yes, man, I was.”

“And now you aren’t?—­Oh, well, leave love alone, as any twopenny doctor would tell you.”

“No, you’re off it there.  It’s nothing technical.  Technically I can make love as much as you like.  It’s nothing a doctor has any say in.  It’s what I feel inside me.  I feel the life going.  I know it’s going.  I never get those inrushes now, unless I drink a jolly lot, or if I possibly could fall in love.  Technically, I’m potent all right—­oh, yes!”

“You should leave yourself and your inrushes alone.”

“But you can’t.  It’s a sort of ache.”

“Then you should stiffen your backbone.  It’s your backbone that matters.  You shouldn’t want to abandon yourself.  You shouldn’t want to fling yourself all loose into a woman’s lap.  You should stand by yourself and learn to be by yourself.  Why don’t you be more like the Japanese you talk about?  Quiet, aloof little devils.  They don’t bother about being loved.  They keep themselves taut in their own selves—­there, at the bottom of the spine—­the devil’s own power they’ve got there.”

Jim mused a bit.

“Think they have?” he laughed.  It seemed comic to him.

“Sure!  Look at them.  Why can’t you gather yourself there?”

“At the tail?”

“Yes.  Hold yourself firm there.”

Jim broke into a cackle of a laugh, and rose.  The two went through the dark woods back to the cottage.  Jim staggered and stumbled like a drunken man:  or worse, like a man with locomotor ataxia:  as if he had no power in his lower limbs.

“Walk there—!” said Lilly, finding him the smoothest bit of the dark path.  But Jim stumbled and shambled, in a state of nauseous weak relaxation.  However, they reached the cottage:  and food and beer—­ and Tanny, piqued with curiosity to know what the men had been saying privately to each other.

After dinner they sat once more talking round the fire.

Lilly sat in a small chair facing the fire, the other two in the armchairs on either side the hearth.

“How nice it will be for you, walking with Lois towards London tomorrow,” gushed Tanny sentimentally.