“I suppose it is true,” he thought, “that when they have been a man’s bedfellow, even for a few months, some peculiar link establishes itself which it is as difficult to break as if one tore a grafted sapling from the branch of a tree. I suppose,” so his thoughts drifted on, “that my love is really more important, in this blind primordial way, to Gerda⁠—just because we have now slept together for three months⁠—than it could ever be to Christie, though she lives inside my very soul! I suppose it’s the old fatality of flesh to flesh, of blind matter, proving itself, after all, the strongest thing on earth.”

And then, before he had the least notion that his thoughts would drift in such a direction, he found himself engaged in a passionate dispute with his father. It was as if the dispute were actually going on down at the bottom of that grave; and though he still found himself calling William Solent “Old Truepenny,” he felt as if he had become a lean worm down there, in the darkness of that hollow skull, arguing with it, arguing with what remained still conscious and critical, although lost “in the pit.”