‘Nay, nay! It’s more than that. Living is moving and moving on. My life won’t go down the proper gutters, it just won’t. So I’m a bit of a waste ticket by myself. And I’ve no business to take a woman into my life, unless my life does something and gets somewhere, inwardly at least, to keep us both fresh. A man must offer a woman some meaning in his life, if it’s going to be an isolated life, and if she’s a genuine woman. I can’t be just your male concubine.’

‘Why not?’ she said.

‘Why, because I can’t. And you would soon hate it.’

‘As if you couldn’t trust me,’ she said.

The grin flickered on his face.

‘The money is yours, the position is yours, the decisions will lie with you. I’m not just my Lady’s fucker, after all.’

‘What else are you?’

‘You may well ask. It no doubt is invisible. Yet I’m something to myself at least. I can see the point of my own existence, though I can quite understand nobody else’s seeing it.’

‘And will your existence have less point, if you live with me?’

He paused a long time before replying:

‘It might.’

She too stayed to think about it.

‘And what is the point of your existence?’

‘I tell you, it’s invisible. I don’t believe in the world, not in money, nor in advancement, nor in the future of our civilization. If there’s got to be a future for humanity, there’ll have to be a very big change from what now is.’

‘And what will the real future have to be like?’

‘God knows! I can feel something inside me, all mixed up with a lot of rage. But what it really amounts to, I don’t know.’

‘Shall I tell you?’ she said, looking into his face. ‘Shall I tell you what you have that other men don’t have, and that will make the future? Shall I tell you?’

‘Tell me then,’ he replied.

‘It’s the courage of your own tenderness, that’s what it is: like when you put your hand on my tail and say I’ve got a pretty tail.’

The grin came flickering on his face.

‘That!’ he said.

Then he sat thinking.

‘Ay!’ he said. ‘You’re right. It’s that really. It’s that all the way through. I knew it with the men. I had to be in touch with them, physically, and not go back on it. I had to be bodily aware of them and a bit tender to them, even if I put em through hell. It’s a question of awareness, as Buddha said. But even he fought shy of the bodily awareness, and that natural physical tenderness, which is the best, even between men; in a proper manly way. Makes ‘em really manly, not so monkeyish. Ay! it’s tenderness, really; it’s cunt–awareness. Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it’s touch we’re afraid of. We’re only half–conscious, and half alive. We’ve got to come alive and aware. Especially the English have got to get into touch with one another, a bit delicate and a bit tender. It’s our crying need.’