that passed her lips. We had talked about the view, about her college, about her school with the measles, about how soon one could tell whether one was a poet, about whether the novel, about why the theatre. I had never talked so easily to anyone. Oh blessed weightlessness, oh blessed space.
«Bradley, I wish I'd understood that stuff you spouted about Hamlet.»
«Forget it. No high theory about Shakespeare is any good, not because he's so divine but because he's so human. Even great art is jumble in the end.»
«So the critics are just stupid?»
«It needs no theory to tell us this! One should simply try to like as much as one can.»
«Like you now trying to like what my father writes?»
«That's more special. I feel I've been unjust. He has huge vitality and he tells a good story. Stories are art too, you know.»
«His stuff is awfully ingenious, but it's as dead as a door nail.»
«So young and so untender.»
«So young, my lord, but true.»
I was nearly on the floor at that moment. I also thought, in so far as thinking occurred, that she was probably right. Only I was not going to utter any harsh thing that evening. I was mainly now, since I had realized that I could not keep her with me for much longer, wondering about whether and if so how I could kiss her on parting. Kissing had never been customary between us, even when she was a child. Briefly, I had never kissed her. Never. And now tonight perhaps I would.
«Bradley, you aren't listening.»
She constantly used my name. I could not use hers. She had no name.
«Ought I to read Wittgenstein?»
What I wanted to do was to kiss her in the lift going down should we chance to have that momentary love nest to ourselves. But of course that was out of the question. There must be no, absolutely no, show of marked interest. She had, as young people with their charming egoism and their impromptu modes so felicitously do, taken it quite calmly for granted that I should suddenly have felt like dining on the Post Office Tower and should, since she had happened to ring up, have happened to ask her to come too.
«No. I shouldn't bother.»
«You think I wouldn't understand him?»
«Yes.»
«Yes, I wouldn't?»
«Yes. He never thought of you.»
«What?»
«I'm quoting again. Never mind.»
«We are full of quotations tonight, aren't we. When I'm with you I feel as if the whole of English literature were inside me like a warm stew and coming out of my ears. I say, what an inelegant metaphor! Oh Bradley, what fun that we're here. Bradley, I do feel so happy!»
«Good.» I asked for the bill. I did not want to ruin what was perfect by any hint of anxious hanging-on. An
