Angelika

“Their friendship — they were both of them careful to insist upon that word — was a thing elusive and moth-like, an unreal emanation of the sweet London dusk from which any intrusion of the material, the physical,
might brush the bloom. They were primarily concerned with each other’s minds and souls. This was, they assured each other, an intellectual comradeship in which two young, eager minds, with eyes wide open, were pre-
pared to discuss any subject under the sun. With a cold and exalted detachment they debated not only the arts — which, naturally, were much more important than
life — but problems of human conduct, such as Communism (they were both Communists, of course), prostitution, birth-control.
At first these discussions filled poor Helena with confusion, for no living Pomfret had ever spoken of such things, but Cyril, when he saw her confused, became almost stern. To be capable of being shocked was a
bourgeois trait; and when once she had got over her first awkwardness she found a certain elevated excitement in calling spades spades. Cyril noticed this, and approved. It was something of an achievement to have
educated this little mouse from Clapham up to his own intellectual level. It made him ruthless, haughty, patronising towards her; and Helena didn’t mind. Indeed, she found an odd satisfaction in the docile humility with which she accepted his views on free
trade, free verse and free love. [...]
And the beauty of the whole thing was this: that apart from their meeting and parting kisses, which, occasionally, on his side, were disturbingly ardent, their relations, so far, had been rigidly Platonic. He had never, in a vulgar way, attempted to make love to her.
They went floating, divided like another and undesirous Paolo and Francesca, through an intellectual heaven. Impersonally. . . .
She sometimes wondered how long this blessed impersonality would last [...]”
― Francis Brett Young