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—Augustine, snapped Scrotes.

MacMurrough wandered about the room, opened a book, closed it again, flicked through the Latin dictionary of Lewis and Short. Scrotes certainly was in a mood, which was inconvenient rather, for he felt a wish to speak with the fellow.

—Why is it always so cold in this turret? he ventured after a time. Never a fire in the grate.

Scrotes tapped his quill in its well.

—I shall tell you why it is cold, he replied. It is cold because you fancy it so. You fancy I wear a skull-cap when I work. You fancy me in threadbare wool. The temperature descends to suit. Industry in your mind is associated with old clothes and ice. Sometimes as I write, droplets freeze on my mittens. It is all most disturbing. A memory of your schooldays no doubt, when they penny-pinched on coals.

MacMurrough yawned. He said, rhyming schoolboy-quick: Amo, amas, I loved a lass, for she was soft and tender; amas, amat, she laid me flat, and tickled my masculine gender.

—He has gone then, your young friend? said Scrotes sighing.

—Yes, I led him down the garden path.

The porcupine quill was wiped with the pen-wiper, the page was blotted, and Scrotes said, You wish to speak with me.

—Do you always eavesdrop on my thoughts?

—You forget: I am your thoughts.

—A portion of them, MacMurrough advised.

Scrotes fleered in deference. The loftier portion, one hopes.

MacMurrough hesitated. It’s about that boy.

—Well?

—While Dick was at him—

—Dick? By which you intend your membrum virile and the wayward cerebrations that command it?

MacMurrough sighed. Very well, while I was sodomizing the kid, I felt an odd poignancy. The oddness remained while we said our goodbye. It was my desire that had occasioned our intercourse, it was by my leave that we walked through the garden. Yet he chose—I do not know by what expediency—to behave as if this were not the case.

—And this explains your sadness? This explains the tenderness you avowed?

—One is not so foolish as to attribute such sentiments to anything more elevated than selfish interest. I was sad for myself; I desired the world should know me for a sad and tender soul.

—And the boy?

—One pities him, naturally. It would be absurd to say one cared.

—Was it pity you felt last evening?—when he spoke of his friend.

His friend, yes, the comfort for the troops who had brought stockings. They planned to swim at the Forty Foot together, every morning, rain or shine. Dick was thrilled by it all and spent much of the night romancing the two into all sorts of performances. Not sure why, now, possibly to humiliate, probably to goad, I asked did he love his friend. Well, no boy loves his chum, or no boy says he does. But he answered, I do.

I do, he answered as in some preposterous dissenting nuptial. And MacMurrough remembered how touching it was that a young fellow in a stranger’s bed should say that he loved his friend. The strangeness of the bed assisted, of course. But still, it was . . . charming.

—But did you pity him? Scrotes would be deferred no longer.

—No, I did not. I thought him naif. Charming, but naif.

—And this morning when you parted, why did you feel sad?

—I have already explained it was an egoistical affectation.

—Your egoism is not in doubt, MacMurrough. What is in doubt is your humanity.

—You never used to hector so.

—You never used to be so cold.

It was cold, and bare with it. Winter prevailed in the dim-lit room. And chancing on the glass that Scrotes kept by his table, MacMurrough caught his face and it seemed to him a fresh and alarming thing, a hanging fruit among the withered leaves. Such a fruit as the ancients described as having a color as though fit to eat: but if plucked it crumpled in your hands into ashes. And where they grow by the Dead Sea these fruits are called the apple of Sodom.

MacMurrough cast an eye on the spiral stairs down. He yearned for Nanny Tremble to come and cosset him. But Scrotes leant forward with eyes of December.

—Answer the truth.