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 can't see that once you break the last restraints on humanity to-day, it is the end. It is the end. Once burst the flood-gates, and you'll never get the water back into control. Never."

"Then let it distil up to heaven. I really don't care."

"But man, you are perverse. What's the matter with you?" suddenly bellowed Kangaroo.

They had gone into the study for coffee. Kangaroo stood with his head dropped and his feet apart, his back to the fire. And suddenly he roared like a lion at Somers. Somers started, then laughed.

"Even perversity has its points," he said.

Kangaroo glowered like a massive cloud. Somers was standing staring at the Dürer etching of St Jerome: he loved Dürer. Suddenly, with a great massive movement, Kangaroo caught the other man to his breast.

"Don't, Lovat," he said, in a much moved voice, pressing the slight body of the lesser man against his own big breast and body. "Don't!" he said, with a convulsive tightening of the arm.

Somers, squeezed so that he could hardly breathe, kept his face from Kangaroo's jacket and managed to ejaculate:

"All right. Let me go and I won't."

"Don't thwart me," pleaded Kangaroo. " Don't—or I shall have to break all connection with you, and I love you so. I love you so. Don't be perverse, and put yourself against me."

He still kept Somers clasped against him, but not squeezed so hard. And Somers heard over his own head the voice speaking with a blind yearning. Not to himself. No. It was speaking over his head, to the void, to the infinite or something tiresome like that. Even the words: "I love you so. I love you so." They made the marrow in Lovat's bones melt, but they made his heart flicker even more devilishly.

"It is an impertinence, that he says he loves me," he thought to himself. But he did not speak, out of regard for Kangaroo's emotion, which was massive and genuine, even if Somers felt it missed his own particular self completely.

In those few moments when he was clasped to the warm, passionate body of Kangaroo, Somers' mind flew with