As for Miss Stafford, one need not be a professed stole to draw the line at a little country girl, pious to insipidity and simple to the brink of silliness.  Here Lawrence, not being one of those who deny facts when they are unwelcome, caught himself up:  she was not insipid and her power over him was undeniable.  Twice within forty-eight hours she had defeated his will, and what was stranger was that each time he had surrendered eagerly, feeling for the moment as though it didn’t matter what he said or did before Isabel.—­It was at this point of his analysis that Lawrence began to take fright.  “You rascal,” he said to himself, “so that’s why you’re off Mrs. Cleve, is it?  What is it you want—­to marry the child?  You would be sick to death of her in six weeks—­and haven’t you had enough of giving hostages to Fortune?”

Hostages to fortune:  that pregnant phrase frightens men who fear nothing else in heaven or earth.  But not one of Hyde’s friends knew that he had ever given fortune a hostage.  He was not reserved as a rule:  indeed he was always willing to argue creed and code with a frankness rare in the self-conscious English race:  he was never shy and there was little in him that was distinctively English.  But he was too subtle and inconsistent for the average homogeneous Englishman, and not even the comrades of trench and tent knew much about his private life.  Lawrence was one of those products of a high civilization which have in them pretty strong affinities with barbarism,—­but always with a difference.  The noble savage tortures his enemy out of hate or revenge:  Lawrence, more sophisticated in brutality, was capable of doing it by way of a psychological experiment.  The savage takes a short cut from desire to possession:  Lawrence though his blood ran hot curbed it from caution, because in modern life women are a burden and a drag.

This was the trained and tempered Lawrence Hyde, a personage of great good humour and numitigable egoism.  This was the companion of easy morals with whom Lawrence was on familiar terms.  But on that first white night at Wanhope Lawrence grew dimly aware of the upheaval of deeper forces, as if his youth were stirring in its grave.  When Laura Clowes smiled at him with her gallant bearing:  when Bernard gripped his hand in wishing him good night:  when Val in the middle of the psychological experiment pierced him with his grave tired eyes, all sorts of feelings long dormant and believed to be dead came to life in Lawrence:  pity, and affection, and remorse and shame.  “Hang the fellow!” Lawrence reflected.  “He’s too like his sister.  And Isabel?  She is a child.”  Whose voice was it that answered, “This is the woman I have been waiting for all my life?”

And then, turning at bay, he came to a sufficiently cynical conclusion.  “No nonsense!” he said to himself.  “Your trouble is that she’s twenty and you’re six and thirty, which is a dangerous age.  But you don’t want to marry her, and there’s no middle course.  Fruit defendu, mon ami:  hands off!  If you can’t be sensible you’ll have to shift out of Wanhope and compromise on Mrs. Cleve.”