But in love-making, as in the other arts, those do it
best who cannot tell how it is done; and he was always stricken with a
palsy when about to present that letter. It seemed that he was only
able to speak to ladies when they were not there. Well, if he could
not speak, he thought the more; he thought so profoundly that in time
the heroines of Pym ceased to thrill him.
This was because he had found out that they were not flesh and blood.
But he did not delight in his discovery: it horrified him; for what he
wanted was the old thrill. To make them human so that they could be
his little friends again--nothing less was called for. This meant
slaughter here and there of the great Pym's brain-work, and Tommy
tried to keep his hands off; but his heart was in it. In Pym's pages
the ladies were the most virtuous and proper of their sex (though
dreadfully persecuted), but he merely told you so at the beginning,
and now and again afterwards to fill up, and then allowed them to act
with what may be called rashness, so that the story did not really
suffer. Before Tommy was nineteen he changed all that. Out went this
because she would not have done it, and that because she could not
have done it.
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