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talk,’ I said;‘all the years I’ve wasted you must have spent loving and living, and not caring a damn. You’re crazy to talk about woods, and flowers in a garden - you haven’t understood, then, after all? Where have you been these last five years, anyway?’
    I was superior to him in my knowledge of suffering. He did not know what it was to be sensitive.
    Jake waited a moment, and when he spoke it was as though he were sorry for me, and the fool I had made of myself, but for himself he did not care.
    ‘I’ve been in prison,’ he said.

4
    W hen Jake told me this I got up blindly from the table and went out, through the swing doors into the street, and began to walk like a drunkard along the pavement brushing against people I did not see, never caring how I went or where I should end. I did not realize that he had followed me, but looking over my shoulder I found that he was walking by my side, and turning my head so he should not see my face, I told him roughly to go, and leave me by myself.
    ‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Jake, and he caught at my wrist before I could strike him. ‘Don’t be a fool,’ he said.
    I wanted to knock him down, for every word of his was like a sting and a reproach to me, who in my ignorance had accused him of a lack of sympathy and an ignorance of sorrow. He had listened without speaking to my interminable rambling story of repression and introspection, with no hint or comparison of what his own life must have been, and he had let me run on, the silly boyish words pouring from my mouth, I who for all my discontent had lived in comfort and security. And in his understanding of my feelings all he had suggested for the difference between us was my possession of woods and rooks, the smell of flowers and the voices of people.
    It seemed to me that I could see him in his cell watching for a glint of light through the grated window, and there would be a smile on his face for the blessed comfort this light would bring to him, whilst I, my hands and my lips buried in the scarlet and golden petals fallen from the azalea and the rhododendron bushes on the lawn at home, the sun on my back, and in my ears the song of a thrush on the sweeping branches of the chestnut tree, would groan and struggle against the impossibility of escape.
    ‘You’d better go away,’ I said to Jake; ‘you can’t hang around with me after what I’ve said. I’m not worth a curse; I’ll clear out, I’ll go with people who don’t matter.’
    ‘Don’t be a fool,’ he said again. We were standing now by a lamp-post at the corner of a street. ‘You don’t have to mind what you say to me,’ he went on, ‘and you don’t need to worry over my years in prison. That’s all gone, and locked away in myself, minding, I mean. You can talk about it whenever you like if it helps you.’
    ‘I feel a swine,’ I said, ‘the way I’ve been throwing about my own story like some fake martyr and you going through hell. . . .’
    ‘Oh! that’s all right,’ he said, and he laughed to show me I need not be shy of him over this.
    ‘What did you do?’ I asked stupidly, and then felt myself go scarlet, for what business was it of mine, anyway?
    ‘I killed a man,’ said Jake.
    I did not know what to say, I wanted to show him that it did not matter to me what he had done, that he would be justified in anything.
    ‘Oh! well,’ I said lamely, ‘I dare say . . .’ but I did not know how to go on with my sentence.
    ‘I expect the other chap deserved all he got. . . .’ I ended, feeling a fool.
    ‘No,’ said Jake, ‘whatever anybody does it can’t give you the excuse to take their lives. I reasoned that out in prison. You get a whole lot of time for thinking there.’
    His words were simple enough, but it hurt me to think of him alone with his thoughts, fighting out the reason for life and death.
    ‘I don’t know,’ I said, wishing to argue on his side, ‘if your chap had done something you couldn’t