[p. 120r]
[2060] must one not, sweet pet?
[2061] When you hold me in your arms, and I you in minde, it naturally does not amount to much, compared to the transports of youth, and even middle age.
[2062] But all is relative, let us bear that in mind, stags and hinds have their needs and we have ours.
[2063] It is even astonishing that you manage so well, I can hardly get over it, what a chaste and sober life you must have led.
[2064] I do too, you must have noticed it.
[2065] Consider moreover that the flesh is not the end-all and the be-all, especially at our age, and name me the lovers who can do with their eyes what we can do with ours, which will soon have seen all there is to s for them to see and have often great difficulty in remaining open, and with their tenderness, without the help of passion, what by this means alone we realize daily, when separated by our respective obligations.
[2066] Consider furthermore, since there is nothing more for us to hide, that I was never beautiful or well-proportioned, but ugly and even misshapen, to judge by the testimonies I have received.
[2067] Papa notably used to say that people would run a mile from me, I have not forgotten the expression.
[2068] And you, sweet, even when you were of an age to quicken the pulse of beauty, did you exhibit the tother requisites?
[2069] I doubt it.
[2070] But with the passing of the years we have become scarcely less hideous than even our best favoured contemporaries and you, in particular, have kept your hair.
[2071] And thanks to our having never served, never understood, we are not without freshness and innocence, it seems to me.
[2072] Moral, for us at last it is the season of love, let us make the most of it, there are pears that only ripen in December.
[2073] Do not fret about our methods, leave all that to me, and I warrant you we'll surprise each other yet. With regard to tête bêche
[p. 121r]
[2073] surprise each other yet.
[2074] With regard to tetty-beshy I must beg to differ, it is well worth persevering with, in my opinion.
[2075] Follow my instructions, you'll come back for moe more.
[2076] For shame, you dirty old man!! [2077] It's all these bones that makes it awkward, that I grant you.
[2078] Well, we must kjust accept ourselves as we are.
[2079] And above all not fret, these are trifles.
[2080] Let us think of the hours when, spent, we lie twined together in the dark, our hearts labouring as one, and listen to the wind saying what it is to be abroad, at night, in winter, and what it is to have been what we have been, and sink together, in an unhappiness that has no name.
[2081] That is how we must look at things.
[2082] So courage, my sweet old hairy Mac, and oyster kisses just where you think from your own Sucky Mol Moll.
[2083] P.S. I enquired about the oyesters, I have hopes.
[2084] Such was the rather rambling style of the declarations which Moll, despairing no doubt of giving vent to her feeling[⁁]s by the normal channels, addressed three or four times a week to Macmann, who never answered, I mean in writing, but manifested by every other means in his power how pleased he was to receive them.
[2085] But towards the close of this idyll, that is to say when it was too late, he began to compose brief rimes of curious structure, to offer to his sweetheart mistress, for he felt she was drifting away from him.
[2086] Example.
[2087] Hairy Mac and Sucky Molly
[2089] In the ending days and nights
[2090] Of unending melancholy
[2088] Love it is at last unites.
[2093] Other example.
[2095] To the lifelong promised land
Of the nearest vcemetery
With his Sucky hand in hand
[2094] Love it is at last leads Hairy.
[2100] He had time to compose ten or twelve more or less in this vein, all
[p. 122r]
[2100] remarkable for their exaltation of love regarded as a kind of lethal glue, a conception frequently to be met with in mystic ytexts.
[2101] And it is extraordinary that Macmann should have succeeded, in so short a time and after such inauspicious beginnings, in elevating himself to a view of this altitude.
[2102] And one can only speculate on what he might have achieved if he had become acquainted with true esexuality at a less advanced age.
[2103] I am lost. [2104] Not a word.
[2105] Inauspicious beginnings indeed, during which his feeling for Moll was frankly one of repugnance.
[2106] Her lips in particular repelled him, those selfsame lips, or so little changed as to make no matter, that some months later he was to suck with grunts of pleasure, so that at the very sight of them he not only closed his eyes, but covered them with his hands for greater safety.
[2107] She It She was she it [₰] therefore who at this period exerted herself in tireless ardours, which may serve to explain why she seemed to weaken in the end and stand in her turn in need of stimulation.
[2108] Unless it was simply a question of health.
[2109] Which does not exclude a third hypothesis, namely that Moll, having finally decided that she had been mistaken in Macmann and that he was not the man she had taken him to be for, sought a means of putting an end to their intercourse, but gently, in order not to give him,a him a shock.
[2110] Unfortunately our concern here is not with Moll, who after all is only a female, but with Macmann, and not with be the close of their relations, but rather with the beginning.
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[2111] Of the brief period of plenitude between these two extremes, when between the warming up of the one party and the cooling down of the other there was established a fleeting equality of temperature, no further mention will be made.
[2112] For if it is indispensable to have in order not to have had and in order to have no longer, there is no obligation to expatiate upon it.
[2113] But let us rather let events speak for themselves, [2114] that's that is more or less the right tone.
[2115] Example Example.
[2116] One day, just as Macmann was getting used to being loved, though without as yet responding as he was subsequently to do, he thrust Moll's face away from hims on the pretext of examining her ear-rings.
[2117] But as she made to return to the charge he repelled checked her again with the first words that came into his head, namely, Why two Christs?, implying that in his opinion one was more than sufficient.
[2118] To which she made the absurd reply, Why two ears?
[2119] But she obtained his forgiveness a moment later, saying, with a smile (she smiled at the least thing), bBesides they are the thieves, Christ is in my mouth.
[2120] Then parting her jaws and pulling down her blobber-lip and she discovered, breaking with its solitary fang the monotony of the gums, a long yellow canine bared to the roots and carved, with the drill probably, to represent the celebrated sacrifice.
[2122] With the forefinger of her free hand she fingered it.
[2123] It's loose, she said, one of these mfine mornings I'll wake up and find I've swallowed it, perhaps I should have it out.
[2124] She let go her lip which sprang back into place with a smack.
[2125] This incident made a sytrong impression on Macmann and Moll rose with a bound in his affections.
[2126] And in the pleasure he was later to enjoy, when he put his tongue in her mouth and let it
[p. 124r][2126] wander over her gums, this rotten crucifix had assuredly its part. [2127] But from these harmless aids what love is free? [2128] Sometimes it is an object, a garter I believe or a sweat-absorber for the armpit. [2129] And sometimes it is the simple image of a third party. [2130] A few words in conclusion on the decline of this liaison. [2131] No, I can't.
[2132] Weary with my weariness, white last moon, sole regret, not even. [2133] To be dead, before her, on her, with her, and turn, dead on dead, about poor mankind, and never have to die any more, from among the living. [2134] Not even, not even that. [2135] My moon was here below, far below, the little I was able to desire. [2136] And one day, soon, soon, one earthlit night, beneath the earth, a dying being will say, like me, in the earthlight, Not even, not even that, and die, without having been able to find a regret.
[2137] Moll.
[2138] I'm going to kill her.
[2139] She continued to look after Macmann, but she was no longer the same.
[2140] When she had finished cleaning up she sat down on a chair, in the middle of the room, and remained without stirring.
[2141] If her 
called her she went and perched on the edge of the bed and even submitted to be titillated.
[2142] But it was obvious her thoughts were elsewhere and her only wish to return to her chair and resume the now familiar gesture of massaging her stomach, slowly, weighing on it with her two hands. [2143] Sjhe was also beginning to smell.
[2144] She had never smelt sweet, but between not smelling sweet and giving off the smell she was giving off now there is a gulf.
[2145] She was also subject to fits of vomiting.
[2146] Turning away, so that her lover should only see her convulsive back, she vomited at length on the floor.
[2147] And these dejections remained sometimes for hours where they fell,