Money? Perhaps one couldn’t say the same there. Money one always wanted. Money, Success, the bitch–goddess, as Tommy Dukes persisted in calling it, after Henry James, that was a permanent necessity. You couldn’t spend your last sou, and say finally: So that’s THAT! No, if you lived even another ten minutes, you wanted a few more sous for something or other. Just to keep the business mechanically going, you needed money. You had to have it. Money you HAVE to have. You needn’t really have anything else. So that’s that!

Since, of course, it’s not your own fault you are alive. Once you are alive, money is a necessity, and the only absolute necessity. All the rest you can get along without, at a pinch. But not money. Emphatically, that’s THAT!

She thought of Michaelis, and the money she might have had with him; and even that she didn’t want. She preferred the lesser amount which she helped Clifford to make by his writing. That she actually helped to make.—‘Clifford and I together, we make twelve hundred a year out of writing’; so she put it to herself. Make money! Make it! Out of nowhere. Wring it out of the thin air! The last feat to be humanly proud of! The rest all–my–eye–Betty–Martin.

So she plodded home to Clifford, to join forces with him again, to make another story out of nothingness: and a story meant money. Clifford seemed to care very much whether his stories were considered first–class literature or not. Strictly, she didn’t care. Nothing in it! said her father. Twelve hundred pounds last year! was the retort simple and final.

If you were young, you just set your teeth, and bit on and held on, till the money began to flow from the invisible; it was a question of power. It was a question of will; a subtle, subtle, powerful emanation of will out of yourself brought back to you the mysterious nothingness of money a word on a bit of paper. It was a sort of magic, certainly it was triumph. The bitch–goddess! Well, if one had to prostitute oneself, let it be to a bitch–goddess! One could always despise her even while one prostituted oneself to her, which was good.

Clifford, of course, had still many childish taboos and fetishes. He wanted to be thought ‘really good’, which was all cock–a–hoopy nonsense. What was really good was what actually caught on. It was no good being really good and getting left with it. It seemed as if most of the ‘really good’ men just missed the bus. After all you only lived one life, and if you missed the bus, you were just left on the pavement, along with the rest of the failures.

Connie was contemplating a winter in London with Clifford, next winter. He and she had caught the bus all right, so they might as well ride on top for a bit, and show it.

The worst of it was, Clifford tended to become vague, absent, and to fall into fits of vacant depression. It was the wound to his psyche coming out. But it made Connie want to scream. Oh God, if the mechanism of the consciousness itself was going to go wrong, then what was one to do? Hang it all, one did one’s bit! Was one to be let down ABSOLUTELY?