SO, drawn by genuine passionate desire, our two heirs to the Wisdom of the Ages came to the cardinal moment of their sexual lives.

And here I find that for one brief chapter at least there has to be a change of key in this veracious narrative.

Hitherto this record of the acts and sayings of Edward Albert has been a simple unemotional record of the facts of the case. and if at times a certain realisation of the immanent absurdity of his life has betrayed itself, it has, I hope, been kept for the most part below the level of derision. But what has to be told now of this young couple is something so pitiful that I find myself taking sides with them against the circumstances that brought them to this pass.

They were both, and Edward Albert more especially, profoundly ignorant of the essentials of sex. That beneficent writer, Mrs Marie Stopes, was already at large in the world about this time, but her instructions in the conditions of connubial happiness had still to penetrate to their class. She was still some years from becoming a sly music-hall joke. Edward Albert knew; indeed he had exaggerated ideas; of venereal disease, clumsy “precautions” and the repulsive aspects of the overwhelming desire for “It”, but the only idea he attached to Maidenhead was that it was a town on the road to Reading with a pretty bridge overlooking Skindle’s Hotel with a very attractive but rather high-class riverside lawn. And Evangeline for her part thought a loving maiden yielded with delight. Something happened, she knew, but she thought it was something happy.

He hardly waited to kiss her. There was a rapid struggle. She felt herself gripped and assailed with insane energy.

“Oh! oh! oh!” she groaned in crescendo. “Stop! Ow-woo-woohoo. Oooh!” The climax of the unendurable passed. Her body went limp.

Then Edward Albert was sitting up with an expression of horror on his face. “Gaw!” he was saying. “You got some disease? It’s blood!”

He dashed for the bathroom.

He came back to discover Evangeline sitting up in a storm of pain, disappointment and fear.

“You pig,” she said. “You fool. You selfish young fool. You ignoramus! What have you done to me? . . . Look at that dirty precaution of yours there. Look at it!”

Her pointing beringed finger trembled.

“Gaw, I forgot all about it!”

“And about me. And about everything. You foul, disgusting young hog.”

“Well, ‘ow was I to know? And anyhow ‘ow about me? What have you done to me?”

“I wish to God I could give you worse than I’ve got. If I could strike you dead this minute I’d strike you dead. Get out of my way.”

“Where you going? What you going to do?”

“Go, Dress. Wash. So far as I can wash. Get away out of sight of you. So as not to be sick.”

She dressed swiftly, going to and fro and flinging insults at him. He sat on the so............