`The money is yours, the position is yours, the decisions will lie with you. I'm not just my Lady's fucker, after all.'

`What else are you?'

`You may well ask. It no doubt is invisible. Yet I'm something to myself at least. I can see the point of my own existence, though I can quite understand nobody else's seeing it.'

`And will your existence have less point, if you live with me?'

He paused a long time before replying:

`It might.'

She too stayed to think about it.

`And what is the point of your existence?'

`I tell you, it's invisible. I don't believe in the world, not in money, nor in advancement, nor in the future of our civilization. If there's got to be a future for humanity, there'll have to be a very big change from what now is.'

`And what will the real future have to be like?'

`God knows! I can feel something inside me, all mixed up with a lot of rage. But what it really amounts to, I don't know.'

`Shall I tell you?' she said, looking into his face. `Shall I tell you what you have that other men don't have, and that will make the future? Shall I tell you?'

`Tell me then,' he replied.

`It's the courage of your own tenderness, that's what it is: like when you put your hand on my tail and say I've got a pretty tail.'

The grin came flickering on his face.

`That!' he said.

Then he sat thinking.

`Ay!' he said. `You're right. It's that really. It's that all the way through. I knew it with the men. I had to be in touch with them, physically, and not go back on it. I had to be bodily aware of them and a bit tender to them, even if I put em through hell. It's a question of awareness, as Buddha said. But even he fought shy of the bodily awareness, and that natural physical tenderness, which is the best, even between men; in a proper manly way. Makes 'em really manly, not so monkeyish. Ay! it's tenderness, really; it's cunt- awareness. Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it's touch we're afraid of. We're only half-conscious, and half alive. We've got to come alive and aware. Especially the English have got to get into touch with one another, a bit delicate and a bit tender. It's our crying need.'

She looked at him.

`Then why are you afraid of me?' she said.

He looked at her a long time before he answered.

`It's the money, really, and the position. It's the world in you.'