“I see now that I despised jealousy because I assumed that it was impossible for Amanda to love any one but me; it was intolerable to imagine anything else, I insisted upon believing that she was as fastidious as myself and as faithful as myself, made indeed after my image, and I went on disregarding the most obvious intimations that she was not, until that still moment in the Indian Ocean, when silently, gently as a drowned body might rise out of the depths of a pool, that knowledge of love dead and honour gone for ever floated up into my consciousness.

“And then I felt that Amanda had cheated me!  Outrageously.  Abominably.

“Now, so far as my intelligence goes, there is not a cloud upon this question.  My demand upon Amanda was outrageous and I had no right whatever to her love or loyalty.  I must have that very clear. . . .

“This aristocratic life, as I conceive it, must be, except accidentally here and there, incompatible with the domestic life.  It means going hither and thither in the universe of thought as much as in the universe of matter, it means adventure, it means movement and adventure that must needs be hopelessly encumbered by an inseparable associate, it means self-imposed responsibilities that will not fit into the welfare of a family.  In all ages, directly society had risen above the level of a barbaric tribal village, this need of a release from the family for certain necessary types of people has been recognized.  It was met sometimes informally, sometimes formally, by the growth and establishment of special classes and orders, of priests, monks, nuns, of pledged knights, of a great variety of non-family people, whose concern was the larger collective life that opens out beyond the simple necessities and duties and loyalties of the steading and of the craftsman’s house.  Sometimes, but not always, that release took the form of celibacy; but besides that there have been a hundred institutional variations of the common life to meet the need of the special man, the man who must go deep and the man who must go far.  A vowed celibacy ceased to be a tolerable rule for an aristocracy directly the eugenic idea entered the mind of man, because a celibate aristocracy means the abandonment of the racial future to a proletariat of base unleaderly men.  That was plain to Plato.  It was plain to Campanelea.  It was plain to the Protestant reformers.  But the world has never yet gone on to the next step beyond that recognition, to the recognition of feminine aristocrats, rulers and the mates of rulers, as untrammelled by domestic servitudes and family relationships as the men of their kind.  That I see has always been my idea since in my undergraduate days I came under the spell of Plato.  It was a matter of course that my first gift to Amanda should be his republic.  I loved Amanda transfigured in that dream. . . .

“There are no such women. . . .