‘No, but seriously, without joking: do you think there is anything in it?’

She looked at him again.

‘Physically wasting?’ she said. ‘I see you getting fatter, and I’m sot wasting myself. Do you think the sun is smaller than he used to be? He’s not to me. And I suppose the apple Adam offered Eve wasn’t really much bigger, if any, than one of our orange pippins. Do you think it was?’

‘Well, hear how he goes on: ‘‘It is thus slowly passing, with a slowness inconceivable in our measures of time, to new creative conditions, amid which the physical world, as we at present know it, will he represented by a ripple barely to be distinguished from nonentity.’’’

She listened with a glisten of amusement. All sorts of improper things suggested themselves. But she only said:

‘What silly hocus–pocus! As if his little conceited consciousness could know what was happening as slowly as all that! It only means HE’S a physical failure on the earth, so he wants to make the whole universe a physical failure. Priggish little impertinence!’

‘Oh, but listen! Don’t interrupt the great man’s solemn words!—’‘The present type of order in the world has risen from an unimaginable part, and will find its grave in an unimaginable future. There remains the inexhaustive realm of abstract forms, and creativity with its shifting character ever determined afresh by its own creatures, and God, upon whose wisdom all forms of order depend.’’—There, that’s how he winds up!’

Connie sat listening contemptuously.

‘He’s spiritually blown out,’ she said. ‘What a lot of stuff! Unnimaginables, and types of order in graves, and realms of abstract forms, and creativity with a shifty character, and God mixed up with forms of order! Why, it’s idiotic!’

‘I must say, it is a little vaguely conglomerate, a mixture of gases, so to speak,’ said Clifford. ‘Still, I think there is something in the idea that the universe is physically wasting and spiritually ascending.’

‘Do you? Then let it ascend, so long as it leaves me safely and solidly physically here below.’

‘Do you like your physique?’ he asked.

‘I love it!’ And through her mind went the words: It’s the nicest, nicest woman’s arse as is!

‘But that is really rather extraordinary, because there’s no denying it’s an encumbrance. But then I suppose a woman doesn’t take a supreme pleasure in the life of the mind.’

‘Supreme pleasure?’ she said, looking up at him. ‘Is that sort of idiocy the supreme pleasure of the life of the mind? No thank you! Give me the body. I believe the life of the body is a greater reality than the life of the mind: when the body is really wakened to life. But so many people, like your famous wind–machine, have only got minds tacked on to their physical corpses.’