The pressure of the hand became inert.
"But aren't you merely inventing other terms for the same thing that I mean, and that I call love?" said Kangaroo, in a strange, toneless voice, looking aside.
"Does it seem to you that I am?" asked Lovat, gently and dispassionately.
The strange, great passionate cloud of Kangaroo still hung there, hovering over the pale, sharp isolation of Somers, who lay looking up. And then it seemed as if the glow and vibration left Kangaroo's body, the cloud became grey and heavy. He sighed, removed his hand, and turned away.
"Ah well!" he said. "Ah well!"
Somers rose, trembling now, and feeling frail.
"I'll go," he said.
"Yes, do go," said Kangaroo.
And without another word Somers went, leaving the other man sunk in a great heap in his chair, as if defeated. Somers did not even pity him. His heart felt queer and cave-like and devoid of emotion.
He was spending the night at the Callcotts. Harriet, too, was there. But he was in no hurry to get back there. It was a clear and very starry night. He took the tram-car away from the centre of the town, then walked. As was always the case with him, in this country, the land and the world disappeared as night fell, as if the day had been an illusion, and the sky came bending down. There was the Milky Way, in clouds of star-fume, bending down right in front of him, right down till it seemed as if he would walk on to it, if he kept going. The pale, fumy drift of the Milky Way drooped down and seemed so near, straight in front, that it seemed the obvious road to take. And one would avoid the strange dark gaps, gulfs, in the way overhead. And one would look across to the floating isles of star-fume, to the south, across the gulfs where the sharp stars flashed like lighthouses, and one would be in a new way denizen of a new plane, walking by oneself. There would be a real new way to take. And the mechanical earth quite obliterated, sunk out.
Only he saw, on the sea's high black horizon, the various reddish sore-looking lights of a ship. There they were—the signs of the ways of men—hot-looking and weary. He
