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There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
He makes love to her as he would to his wife.
“The truth is,” Eccles tells him with womanish excitement, in a voice embarrassed but determined, “you’re monstrously selfish. You’re a coward. You don’t care about right or wrong; you worship nothing except your own worst instincts.”
“If you have the guts to be yourself,” he says, “other people’ll pay your price.”
He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk.
“Right and wrong aren’t dropped from the sky. We. We make them. Against misery. Invariably, Harry, invariably”—he grows confident of his ability to negotiate long words—“misery follows their disobedience. Not our own, often at first not our own. Now you’ve had an example of that in your own life.”
He has nervously felt her watching him for some sign of resolution inspired by her speech. In fact he has hardly listened; it is too complicated and, compared to the vision of a sandwich, unreal.
