11

"There I'm with you," cried Benham, struggling out of the thick torrent of Prothero's prepossessions. "What we want to do is our work."

He clung to his idea. He raised his voice to prevent Prothero getting the word again.

"It's this, that you call Work, that I call—what do I call it?—living the aristocratic life, which takes all the coarse simplicity out of this business. If it was only submission…. YOU think it is only submission—giving way…. It isn't only submission. We'd manage sex all right, we'd be the happy swine our senses would make us, if we didn't know all the time that there was something else to live for, something far more important. And different. Absolutely different and contradictory. So different that it cuts right across all these considerations. It won't fit in…. I don't know what this other thing is; it's what I want to talk about with you. But I know that it IS, in all my bones…. YOU know…. It demands control, it demands continence, it insists upon disregard."

But the ideas of continence and disregard were unpleasant ideas to Prothero that day.

"Mankind," said Benham, "is overcharged with this sex. It suffocates us. It gives life only to consume it. We struggle out of the urgent necessities of a mere animal existence. We are not so much living as being married and given in marriage. All life is swamped in the love story…."

"Man is only overcharged because he is unsatisfied," said Prothero, sticking stoutly to his own view.