Startled by his words, Mike strove to measure the thought.

“I can see nothing interesting in the fact that it is natural to you to behave badly to every woman who gives you a chance of deceiving her.  That’s what it amounts to.  At the end of a week you’ll tire of this new girl as you did of the others.  I think it a great shame.  It isn’t gentlemanly.”

Mike winced at the word “gentlemanly.”  For a moment he thought of resentment, but his natural amiability predominated, and he said—­

“I hope not.  I really do think I can love this one; she isn’t like the others.  Besides, I shall be much happier.  There is, I know, a great sweetness in constancy.  I long for this sweetness.”  Seeing by Frank’s face that he was still angry, he pursued his thoughts in the line which he fancied would be most agreeable; he did so without violence to his feelings.  It was as natural to him to think one way as another.  Mike’s sycophancy was so innate that it did not appear, and was therefore almost invariably successful.  “I have been the lover of scores of women, but I never loved one.  I have always hoped to love; it is love that I seek.  I find love-tokens and I do not know who were the givers.  I have possessed nothing but the flesh, and I have always looked beyond the flesh.  I never sought a woman for her beauty.  I dreamed of a companion, one who would share each thought; I have dreamed of a woman to whom I could bring my poetry, who could comprehend all sorrows, and with whom I might deplore the sadness of life until we forget it was sad, and I have been given some more or less imperfect flesh.”

“I,” said Frank, “don’t care a rap for your blue-stockings.  I like a girl to look pretty and sweet in a muslin dress, her hair with the sun on it slipping over her shoulders, a large hat throwing a shadow over the garden of her face.  I like her to come and sit on my knee in the twilight before dinner, to come behind me when I am working and put her hand on my forehead, saying, ‘Poor old man, you are tired!’”

“And you could love one girl all your life—­Lizzie Baker, for instance; and you could give up all women for one, and never wander again free to gather?”

“It is always the same thing.”

“No, that is just what it is not.  The last one was thin, this one is fat; the last one was tall, this one is tiny.  The last one was stupid, this one is witty.  Some men seek the source of the Nile, I the lace of a bodice.  A new love is a voyage of discovery.  What is her furniture like?  What will she say?  What are her opinions of love?  But when you have been a woman’s lover a month you know her morally and physically.  Society is based on the family.  The family alone survives, it floats like an ark over every raging flood.  But you may understand without being able to accept, and I cannot accept, although I understand and love family life.  What promiscuity of body and mind!  The idea of never being alone fills me with horror to lose that secret self, which, like a shy bird, flies out of sight in the day, but is with you, oh, how intensely in the morning!”