“Well, I’m sure I wish you luck with your Slate , Chris! Don’t sponge out anything, though, I beg you. I mean, don’t tear anything up, however much you revise!”

Even while he was uttering this harmless encouragement, some devilish analytical self-consciousness in him was noting the fact that he didn’t like the thought of Christie’s appreciation of any sort of Rabelaisianism. “Christ! What a selfish, lecherous demon I am!” he said to himself. “I suppose I want her response to my lovemaking to be her one and only awareness of the amorous element in life!”

He became at this moment intensely anxious to clear up certain things in his own mind.

“What feather is that, Christie, that you keep in your Urn-Burial ?”