I thought of Holmes tossing upon his bed of sickness and counting the minutes, perhaps, until I could bring help to him. It was not a time to stand upon ceremony. His life depended upon my promptness. Before the apologetic butler had delivered his message I had pushed past him and was in the room.

With a shrill cry of anger a man rose from a reclining chair beside the fire. I saw a great yellow face, coarse-grained and greasy, with heavy, double-chin, and two sullen, menacing gray eyes which glared at me from under tufted and sandy brows. A high bald head had a small velvet smoking-cap poised coquettishly upon one side of its pink curve. The skull was of enormous capacity, and yet as I looked down I saw to my amazement that the figure of the man was small and frail, twisted in the shoulders and back like one who has suffered from rickets in his childhood.

“What’s this?” he cried in a high, screaming voice. “What is the meaning of this intrusion? Didn’t I send you word that I would see you to-morrow morning?”

“I am sorry,” said I, “but the matter cannot be delayed. Mr. Sherlock Holmes —”

The mention of of my friend’s name had an extraordinary effect upon the little man. The look of anger passed in an instant from his face. His features became tense and alert.

“Have you come from Holmes?” he asked.

“I have just left him.”

“What about Holmes? How is he?”

“He is desperately ill. That is why I have come.”

The man motioned me to a chair, and turned to resume his own. As he did so I caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror over the mantelpiece. I could have sworn that it was set in a malicious and abominable smile. Yet I persuaded myself that it must have been some nervous contraction which I had surprised, for he turned to me an instant later with genuine concern upon his features.

“I am sorry to hear this,” said he. “I only know Mr. Holmes through some business dealings which we have had, but I have every respect for his talents and his character. He is an amateur of crime, as I am of disease. For him the villain, for me the microbe. There are my prisons,” he continued, pointing to a row of bottles and jars which stood upon a side table. “Among those gelatine cultivations some of the very worst offenders in the world are now doing time.”

“It was on account of your special knowledge that Mr. Holmes desired to see you. He has a high opinion of you and thought that you were the one man in London who could help him.”

The little man started, and the jaunty smoking-cap slid to the floor.

“Why?” he asked. “Why should Mr. Holmes think that I could help him in his trouble?”

“Because of your knowledge of Eastern diseases.”

“But why should he think that this disease which he has contracted is Eastern?”

“Because, in some professional inquiry, he has been working among Chinese sailors down in the docks.”

‘Oh damn it all! If a fellow’s going to trade on his disabilities, I might begin to say how lonely I am, and always have been, and all the rest of the my–eye–Betty–Martin sob–stuff! Damn it all, if a fellow’s got nothing but disabilities to recommend him...’

He turned aside, working his hands furiously in his trousers pockets. That evening he said to her:

‘You’re coming round to my room tonight, aren’t you? I don’t darn know where your room is.’

‘All right!’ she said.

He was a more excited lover that night, with his strange, small boy’s frail nakedness. Connie found it impossible to come to her crisis before he had really finished his. And he roused a certain craving passion in her, with his little boy’s nakedness and softness; she had to go on after he had finished, in the wild tumult and heaving of her loins, while he heroically kept himself up, and present in her, with all his will and self–offering, till she brought about her own crisis, with weird little cries.

When at last he drew away from her, he said, in a bitter, almost sneering little voice:

‘You couldn’t go off at the same time as a man, could you? You’d have to bring yourself off! You’d have to run the show!’

This little speech, at the moment, was one of the shocks of her life. Because that passive sort of giving himself was so obviously his only real mode of intercourse.

‘What do you mean?’ she said.

‘You know what I mean. You keep on for hours after I’ve gone off...and I have to hang on with my teeth till you bring yourself off by your own exertions.’

She was stunned by this unexpected piece of brutality, at the moment when she was glowing with a sort of pleasure beyond words, and a sort of love for him. Because, after all, like so many modern men, he was finished almost before he had begun. And that forced the woman to be active.

‘But you want me to go on, to get my own satisfaction?’ she said.

He laughed grimly: ‘I want it!’ he said. ‘That’s good! I want to hang on with my teeth clenched, while you go for me!’

‘But don’t you?’ she insisted.

He avoided the question. ‘All the darned women are like that,’ he said. ‘Either they don’t go off at all, as if they were dead in there...or else they wait till a chap’s really done, and then they start in to bring themselves off, and a chap’s got to hang on. I never had a woman yet who went off just at the same moment as I did.’

Connie only half heard this piece of novel, masculine information. She was only stunned by his feeling against her...his incomprehensible brutality. She felt so innocent.

‘But you want me to have my satisfaction too, don’t you?’ she repeated.

‘Oh, all right! I’m quite willing. But I’m darned if hanging on waiting for a woman to go off is much of a game for a man...’