From this experience I won, not remorse, but manhood.  I rejoiced in what I had done.  But I did not tell any living soul and only my wife ever heard the truth.  Time passed and I proceeded with my life in normal fashion, learning myself and increasing my understanding of human nature.  I was never under any domination of passion, but exercised great restraint and found that only by self-knowledge and self-command comes power.  I did not seek forbidden fruit, but did not shun it.  My life proceeded orderly; I chose the profession of dentist, as being likely to introduce me to people of a more interesting type than my father’s acquaintance; and I kept an open mind for myself, but a shut mind for others.

My chief joy at this season was represented by my occasional visits to Italy with my mother.  Already I felt that land to be my home and hated Cornwall and its bleak inhabitants.  Then, at the psychological moment, a girl woke instincts until then dormant; I was faced with rarest good fortune and discovered a kindred spirit of the opposite sex.  That any woman lived who could see with my eyes, or share my contempt of the trammels set round life, I did not believe until I met with Jenny Redmayne.  Women had never interested me, save in the case of my mother, and I had seen none other with her large heart, tolerance, humour and indifference to convention.

Then a chance friend, the brainless Robert Redmayne, brought his niece to spend her school holiday with him and I discovered in the seventeen-year-old schoolgirl a magnificent and pagan simplicity of mind, combined with a Greek loveliness of body that created in me a convulsion.  From the day that we met, from the hour that I heard her laugh at her uncle’s objection to mixed bathing, I was as one possessed; and my triumphant joy may be judged, though never measured, when I perceived that Jenny recognized in me the complement and precious addition unconsciously sought of her own spirit.

That spirit she had scarcely understood; but now its clean and fierce white light shone in secret for me alone.  We loved one another devotedly from the first understanding; and each fresh find in the heart of the other drew us together with increasing worship and passion.  We were probably the most exquisite man and woman, the most original, beautiful, fearless and distinguished, that had ever come together in the benighted township of Penzance.  People stared at us sometimes as though we were a faun and nymph; but they did not guess that our hearts were formed to match our wondrous bodies.  Fire leaped to fire and before the girl finished her education we were dedicated to each other forever.

What she saw in me was my extraordinary masculine beauty, combined with an intellect that set good and evil in their places and soared, by native instinct, above both.  What I discovered in her was an attitude of mind so inquiring and so lawless, so utterly devoid of any familiar prejudice or mother-taught opinion, that I felt as the finder of a priceless jewel unstained by earth or heaven.  Her intellect was pure and not vitiated by any superstition; she revealed a healthy thirst for experience; she adored me and my attitude to life.  We made fascinating voyages of discovery into each others’ hearts; we experimented from time to time on ordinary people; and we quickly discovered that we both possessed rare histrionic ability.