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 impulse. Shaw cut capers for him, and Paul laughed with the hysterical abandon of a child who has had to be violently diverted out of a long fit of moping. Shaw gleefully rattled the skeletons Paul had refused to reverence but had not known how to dispose of. Shaw cried his healthy, heathenish cause from the rooftops; championed him, and put him forward as a champion. And at the end seemed to say, "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" And Paul cordially agreed, in blissful forgetfulness of his own mortality.

"Your friends," said Don Juan to the Devil, "are the dullest dogs I know. They are not beautiful: they are only shaved and starched . . . not generous, only propitiatory; not disciplined, only cowed; and not truthful at all—liars every one of them, to the very backbone of their souls!"

At one stroke the adolescent cobwebs were swept away. In the store-house of his mind Paul had been trying to range parcels that had been delivered there labelled "virtue," "vice"—or whatever—but containing suspiciously incompatible lumps. Off with the wrappers! That was Shaw's way. And the process of classification went on apace, almost automatically.

From the dry deck to which Shaw had caught him up, Paul surveyed with an ineffable sense of safety a seaful of floundering limbs and debris where he had been desperately keeping his own ego afloat. At a bookshop in Marseilles he found little green copies of other plays, and put them into his handbag to read in the train which was to bear him towards Germany.