“No!” she protested, clinging to him. “Why? Why?”

“There’s black days coming for us all and for everybody,” he repeated with a prophetic gloom.

“No! You’re not to say it!”

He was silent. But she could feel the black void of despair inside him. That was the death of all desire, the death of all love: this despair that was like the dark cave inside the men, in which their spirit was lost.

“And you talk so coldly about sex,” she said. “You talk as if you had only wanted your own pleasure and satisfaction.”

She was protesting nervously against him.

“Nay!” he said. “I wanted to have my pleasure and satisfaction of a woman, and I never got it: because I could never get my pleasure and satisfaction of her unless she got hers of me at the same time. And it never happened. It takes two.”