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By Root 5756 0

of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman.’ He read the words out loud. Gladys had a perfect figure. ‘Like a round goblet that wanteth not liquor.’ These orientals knew what passion was. Miscalling libidinousness ‘passion,’ Mr. Quarles regarded himself as a very passionate man. ‘Thy belly is like an heap of wheat.’ Passion is respectable, is actually respected by the law in some countries. For the poets it is even sacred. He agreed with the poets. But ‘like young roes’ was an odd, inadequate simile. Gladys was plump without being fat, firmly resilient. Roes, on the contrary…As a man of great passions, Sidney could regard himself as positively a noble and heroic figure. ‘A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire with spikenard; spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh…’ But, of course, the word was ‘garlic’! Six letters. A kind of onion. ‘Myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices.’

Their train next morning was nearly twenty minutes late. ‘Scandalous,’ Mr. Quarles kept repeating, as he looked at his watch, ‘disgraceful.’

‘You’re in a great hurry to be at your Indians,’ said Philip, smiling from his corner.

His father frowned and talked about something else. At Liverpool Street they parted, Sidney in one taxi, Philip and Elinor in a second. Sidney reached his flat only just in time. He was still engaged in washing the grime of the journey from his large, flesh-padded hands, when the bell rang. He made haste to rinse and dry himself, then, adjusting his face, he stepped into the hall and opened. It was Gladys. He received her with a kind of condescending regality, his chin tilted, his chest thrown back, his waistcoat projecting, but smiling down at her (Gladys called herself ‘petite’) and graciously twinkling through half-shut eyelids. It was an impudent, vulgar, snubby little face that smiled back at him. But it was not her face that had brought Mr. Quarles to London, it was not the individual Gladys Helmsley; it was the merely generic aspect of the woman, her ‘figah,’ as Sidney would have euphemistically put it.

‘You’re very punctual, my dyah,’ he said, holding out his hand.

Gladys was rather taken aback by the coolness of his greeting. After what had happened last time, she had expected something tenderer.

‘Am I!’ she said, for lack of anything better to say; and since human beings have only a limited number of noises and grimaces with which to express the multiplicity of their emotions, she laughed as though she had been amused by something, when in fact she was only surprised and disquieted. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him, provocative-petulantly, why he didn’t kiss her, whether he was tired of her—_already_. But she decided to wait.

‘Almost too punctual,’ Sidney went on. ‘My train was scandalouslah late. Scandalouslah!’ He radiated indignation.

‘Fancy! ‘ said Gladys. The refinement that hung around her speech, like a too genteel disguise, dropped away from time to time, leaving individual words and phrases nakedly cockney.

‘Ryahly disgraceful!’ said Sidney. ‘Trains have no business to be late. I shall write to the Traffic Superintendent at Liverpool Street. I’m not sure,’ he added, still more importantly, ‘that I shan’t write to the Times as well.’

Gladys was impressed. Mr. Quarles had intended that she should be. Apart from all merely sensual satsfactions, the greatest charm of his sexual holidays resided in the fact that they were shared with impressible companions. Sidney liked them, not only young, but of a lower class, and poor. To feel himself unequivocally superior and genuinely admired was for Sidney a luxury almost as great as an embracement. His escapades were holidays not only from chastity, but also from that sense of inferiority which, at home, in parliament, at the office, had always inveterately haunted him. In relation to young women of the lower classes he was a great man, as well as a ‘passionate