“I wanted to get out of my intolerable, close, personal cabin.  I wanted to feel the largeness of the sky.  I went out upon the deck.  We were off the coast of Madras, and when I think of that moment, there comes back to me also the faint flavour of spice in the air, the low line of the coast, the cool flooding abundance of the Indian moonlight, the swish of the black water against the side of the ship.  And a perception of infinite loss, as if the limitless heavens above this earth and below to the very uttermost star were just one boundless cavity from which delight had fled. . . .

“Of course I had lost her.  I knew it with absolute certainty.  I knew it from her insecure temperament, her adventurousness, her needs.  I knew it from every line she had written me in the last three months.  I knew it intuitively.  She had been unfaithful.  She must have been unfaithful.

“What had I been dreaming about to think that it would not be so?”

21

“Now let me write down plainly what I think of these matters.  Let me be at least honest with myself, whatever self-contradictions I may have been led into by force of my passions.  Always I have despised jealousy. . . .

“Only by the conquest of four natural limitations is the aristocratic life to be achieved.  They come in a certain order, and in that order the spirit of man is armed against them less and less efficiently.  Of fear and my struggle against fear I have told already.  I am fearful.  I am a physical coward until I can bring shame and anger to my assistance, but in overcoming fear I have been helped by the whole body of human tradition.  Every one, the basest creatures, every Hottentot, every stunted creature that ever breathed poison in a slum, knows that the instinctive constitution of man is at fault here and that fear is shameful and must be subdued.  The race is on one’s side.  And so there is a vast traditional support for a man against the Second Limitation, the limitation of physical indulgence.  It is not so universal as the first, there is a grinning bawling humour on the side of grossness, but common pride is against it.  And in this matter my temperament has been my help:  I am fastidious, I eat little, drink little, and feel a shivering recoil from excess.  It is no great virtue; it happens so; it is something in the nerves of my skin.  I cannot endure myself unshaven or in any way unclean; I am tormented by dirty hands or dirty blood or dirty memories, and after I had once loved Amanda I could not—­unless some irrational impulse to get equal with her had caught me—­have broken my faith to her, whatever breach there was in her faith to me. . . .

“I see that in these matters I am cleaner than most men and more easily clean; and it may be that it is in the vein of just that distinctive virtue that I fell so readily into a passion of resentment and anger.

“I despised a jealous man.  There is a traditional discredit of jealousy, not so strong as that against cowardice, but still very strong.  But the general contempt of jealousy is curiously wrapped up with the supposition that there is no cause for jealousy, that it is unreasonable suspicion.  Given a cause then tradition speaks with an uncertain voice. . . .