In this connection the mysterious and haunting question of sex obtruded itself.  And, along with it, the thought of two eminently diverse persons, namely Lesbia Faircloth and the dear, the more than ever dear, man with the blue eyes.  That, in his agony, her father should have desired the visit of the former, once his mistress, had been very bitter to bear, provoking in Damaris a profound though silent jealousy.  This had even come in some degree between her and Faircloth.  For, in proportion as that visit more effectually united father and son, it abolished her position as intermediary between the two.

Recalling the incident jealousy moved her now, so that she gathered up the reins hastily and touched the horse with the whip.  It sprang forward, danced and behaved, before settling down to the swinging trot which, in so handsome a fashion, ate up the blond road crossing the brown expanse of moor.

Damaris was surprised and distressed by the vehemence of her own emotion.  That her jealousy was retrospective, and belonged to a past now over and done with, she admitted.  Yet, thinking of her father’s demand to see Lesbia, how amazingly deep it went, how profound, and lasting is the empire of “feeling in that way”—­so she put it, falling back on her phrase of nearly three years ago, first coined at St. Augustin.

And this was where Carteret came in.—­For he alone, of all men, had made her, Damaris, ever consciously “feel in that way.”—­A fact of immense significance surely, could she but grasp the full, the inner meaning of it—­and one which entered vitally into the matter of “beginning again.”  Therefore, so she argued, the proposed simplifying, broadening, democratizing of her outlook must cover—­amongst how much else!—­the whole astonishing business of “feeling in that way.”

She shrank from the conclusion as unwelcome.  The question of sex was still distasteful to her.  But she bade herself, sternly, not to shrink.  For without some reasoned comprehension of it—­as now dawned on her—­the ways of human beings, of animals, of plants and, so some say, even of minerals, are unintelligible, arbitrary, and nonsensical.  It is the push of life itself, essential, fundamental, which makes us “feel in that way”—­the push of spirit yearning to be clothed upon with flesh, made visible and given its chance to enter the earthly arena, to play an individual part in the beautiful, terrible earthly scene.  Therefore she must neglect it, reject it no longer.  It had to be met and understood, if she would graduate in the school of reality; and in what other possible school is it worth while to graduate?

Reaching which climax in her argument, the selfishness of her recent behaviour became humiliatingly patent to her.  From the whole household, but especially from Carteret and Aunt Felicia, she had taken all and given nothing in return.  She had added to their grief, their anxieties, by her silence, her apathy, her whimsies.