The fantastic dread which recurred to his memory now, as he turned from Dean Street into Oxford Street, had been started when he first heard the legendary tale of Hadleigh Wood.  It was said that seventy or a hundred years ago some louts had caught girls bathing in the stream and violated them.  The legend declared that one of the offenders was executed and the rest were sent to prison for life.  Perhaps it was all a myth, but it helped to give the upper wood a bad name; and out of these fabled materials William had built his fancy—­dread and desire combining—­a wish that, when he pushed the branches apart, he might see a lass bathing; and a fear that he would not be able to resist an impulse to plunge into the water and carry her off.  As he walked through the shade cast by summer foliage, with a hot whisper of nascent virility tormenting his senses, the fancy was almost strong enough to be a hallucination.  He could imagine that he saw female garments on the bank, petticoats fallen in a circle, boots and stockings hard by; he could hear the splashing of water on the other side of the holly bushes; he could feel the weight of the nude form slung across his shoulder as he galloped into the gloom with his prey.  And later, under the increasing stress of his adolescence, he used to have a dread of realities—­a conviction that he could not trust himself.  He thought at this period not of legends, but of facts—­of things that truly happened; of the brutality of hayfields; of a man full of beer dealing roughly with a woman-laborer who unluckily came in his way alone and defenceless at nightfall.

From all this kind of vague peril his wife had saved him.  When in the course of his education he read of nymphs and satyrs, and was startled by what seemed a highly elaborated version of his own crude imaginings, he had already, through the influence of Mavis, attained to states of mind that rendered such suggestions powerless to stir his pulses or warm his blood; and now, as he recognized with proud satisfaction, he had reached a stage of development wherein the improper advances of a thousand houris would evoke merely indignation and repugnance.  It was not a matter that one could boast about to anybody except one’s self; but he wondered if Mr. Ridgett, or several other customers who might remain nameless, could say as much.

Thanks to Mav!  Yes, he ought always let himself be guided by her.

And then, by a natural transition of ideas, he thought of that other great instinct of untutored man—­the fighting instinct.  When a person is rising in the social scale he should learn to govern that also.  Although the nobs themselves do it when pushed to it, scrapping is not respectable.  It is common.  Nevertheless there must be exceptions to every rule:  anger when justified by its provocation is not, can not be reprehensible.