He did not wait for her to reply but went on:
"I'm wondering why we mess about with it. What's the good of it, all? Who are you? I don't know. Who am I? You don't know. We live in a beastly dirty town and we wander about like lost souls. And because we be lost souls we take anything that comes along--you me, I you. Is it good enough? It's all wrong. But what's right? . . . It's fun, I suppose. Fun! . . . But what else is there?"
"I tell you what. I'm damned sorry for you."
"Of course," said Annie Lipsett. "Of course, you're a gentleman."
And Frederic laughed. He told himself that he was an idiot, and that all _that_ was not his affair. He had brought this girl here, just as all the other young men in the place had brought all the other young women, to forget, to escape for a little while, to lose all thought of the beastliness of life down below in the town. It _was_ beastly. Everything was so dirty, and everybody was so poor and so tired. . . . He took the girl in his arms and held her very close and whispered silly talk to her, and soon she was sighing and lying and nestling to him.
They were ten minutes late in their return to the lamp-post by the church, and Haslam and the tall girl were very ill at ease and silent. Annie Lipsett clung to Frederic's arm and they walked down to the bishop's palace. There they parted. Frederic kissed her and she clung to him. The tall girl led her away and they vanished into the night.
As they turned their faces homewards Haslam said:
"Gawd! I have had a rummy time. I couldn't touch her without her starting on the crying game. Sha'n't see her again."
"I'm a bit of a swine, the same as you," retorted Frederic.
_Our own precedent passions do instruct us What levity is in youth._ TIMON OF ATHENS.
YOUNG people must for ever be trying to fall in love, and in this ancient sport young women are every bit as active as young men. For the matter of that, the greater part of humanity remain adolescent in this affair, that is, hemmed in by a thick-set hedge of prejudice and unsatisfied emotion and convention and childish theory, so that they are for ever in a state of uneasy curiosity about love, always ready to put salt on its tail, but unable to come within reach of it. For that reason they are always confusing love with being in love, an active state of living which can be permanent with an emotional condition which must be transitory.