He could remember well enough his rage when he took her to him in that last embrace and she would not give him both her hands, because in one she held the ebony cross of her rosary, to make her strong to do this unnatural thing.  Well, perhaps it was natural enough that that hour should seem most real to him, for it was then that he had found out their real relationship.  To him it had seemed as if they were two children wandering in the unfriendly desert that is life, comforting each other with kisses, finding in their love a refuge from coldness and unkindness.  But in her fear he perceived that she had never been his comrade.  She had thought of him as an external power, like the Church, who told her to do things, and in the end the choice had been for her not between a dear and pitied lover and a creed, but between two tyrants; and since one tyrant threatened damnation while the other only promised love, a sensible woman knew which to choose.  All he had thought of her had been an illusion.  The years he had given to his love for her were as wasted as if he had spent them in drunkenness or in prison.

Oh, women were the devil!  All except his mother.  They were the clumsiest of biological devices, and as they handed on life they spoiled it.  They stood at the edge of the primeval swamps and called the men down from the highlands of civilisation and certain cells determined upon immortality betrayed their victims to them.  They served the seed of life, but to all the divine accretions that had gathered round it, the courage that adventures, the intellect that creates, the soul that questions how it came, they were hostile.  They hated the complicated brains that men wear in their heads as men hated the complicated hats that women wear on their heads; they hated men to look at the stars because they are sexless; they hated men who loved them passionately because such love was tainted with the romantic and imaginative quality that spurs them to the folly of science and art and exploration.  And yet surely there were other women.  Surely there was a woman somewhere who, if one loved her, would prove not a mere possession who would either bore one or go and get lost just when one had grown accustomed to it, but would be an endless research.  A woman who would not be a mere film of graceful submissiveness but real as a chemical substance, so that one could observe her reactions and find out her properties; and like a chemical substance, irreducible to final terms, so that one never came to an end.  A woman who would get excited about life as men do and could laugh and cheer.  A woman whose beauty would be forever significant with speculation.  He perceived with a shock that he was thinking of this woman not as one thinks of a hypothetical person, but with the glowing satisfaction which one feels in recounting the charms of a new friend.  He was thinking of some real person.  It was someone he had met quite lately, someone with red hair.  He was thinking of that little Ellen Melville.