Yes—­as it galled him to recollect—­he had shown great plasticity for a time.  He was then in the middle of his Oxford years, and Raeburn’s letters and Raeburn’s influence had certainly pulled him through various scrapes that might have been disastrous.  Then—­a little later—­he could see the shooting lodge on the moors above Loch Etive, where he and Raeburn, Lord Maxwell, Miss Raeburn, and a small party had spent the August of his twenty-first birthday.  Well—­that surly keeper, and his pretty wife who had been Miss Raeburn’s maid—­could anything be more inevitable?  A hard and jealous husband, and one of the softest, most sensuous natures that ever idleness made love to.  The thing was in the air!—­in the summer, in the blood—­as little to be resisted as the impulse to eat when you are hungry, or drink when you thirst.  Besides, what particular harm had been done, what particular harm could have been done with such a Cerberus of a husband?  As to the outcry which had followed one special incident, nothing could have been more uncalled for, more superfluous.  Aldous had demanded contrition, had said strong things with the flashing eyes, the set mouth of a Cato.  And the culprit had turned obstinate—­would repent nothing—­not for the asking.  Everything was arguable, and Renan’s doubt as to whether he or Theophile Gautier were in the right of it, would remain a doubt to all time—­that was all Raeburn could get out of him.  After which the Hebraist friend of course had turned his back on the offender, and there was an end of it.

That incident, however, had belonged to a stage in his past life, a stage marked by a certain prolonged tumult of the senses, on which he now looked back with great composure.  That tumult had found vent in other adventures more emphatic a good deal than the adventure of the keeper’s wife.  He believed that one or two of them had been not unknown to Raeburn.

Well, that was done with!  His mother’s death—­that wanton stupidity on the part of fate—­and the shock it had somehow caused him, had first drawn him out of the slough of a cheap and facile pleasure on which he now looked back with contempt.  Afterwards, his two years of travel, and the joys at once virile and pure they had brought with them, joys of adventure, bodily endurance, discovery, together with the intellectual stimulus which comes of perpetual change, of new heavens, new seas, new societies, had loosened the yoke of the flesh and saved him from himself.  The deliverance so begun had been completed at home, by the various chances and opportunities which had since opened to him a solid and tempting career in that Labour movement his mother had linked him with, without indeed ever understanding either its objects or its men.  The attack on capital now developing on all sides, the planning of the vast campaign, and the handling of its industrial troops, these things had made the pursuit of women look insipid, coupled as they were with the thrill of increasing personal success.  Passion would require to present itself in new forms, if it was now to take possession of him again.