morning cool, composed and exquisite, like a lily bud. There was a look
of immaculate sexless purity about Gerda; she might have stood for the
angel Gabriel, wide-eyed and young and grave. With this wide innocent
look she would talk unabashed of things which Neville felt revolting. And
she, herself, was the product of a fastidious generation and class, and
as nearly sexless as may be in this besexed world, which however is not,
and can never be, saying much. Kay would do the same. They would read and
discuss Freud, whom Neville, unfairly prejudiced, found both an obscene
maniac and a liar. They might laugh with her at Freud when he expanded on
that complex, whichever it is, by which mothers and daughters hate each
other, and fathers and sons--but they both all the same took seriously
things which seemed to Neville merely loathsome imbecilities. Gerda and
Kay didn't, in point of fact, find so many things either funny or
disgusting as Neville did; throwing her mind back twenty years, Neville
tried to remember whether she had found the world as funny and as
frightful when she was a medical student as she did now; on the whole she
thought not. Boys and girls are, for all their high spirits, creatures of
infinite solemnities and pomposities. They laugh; but the twinkling
irony, mocking at itself and everything else, of the thirties and
forties, they have not yet learnt. They cannot be gentle cynics; they
are so full of faith and hope, and when these are hurt they turn savage.
About Kay and Gerda there was a certain splendid earnestness with regard
to life. Admirable creatures, thought Neville, watching them with
whimsical tenderness. They had nothing to do with the pre-war, dilettante
past, the sophisticated gaiety of the young century. Their childhood had
been lived during the great war, and they had emerged from it hot with
elemental things, discussing life, lust, love, politics and social
reform, with cool candour, intelligent thoroughness and Elizabethan
directness. They wouldn't mind having passions and giving them rein; they
wouldn't think it vulgar, or even tedious, to lead loose lives. Probably,