“Isn’t it that there is some greater desire at the back of the human mind?” the doctor suggested.  “Which refuses to be content with pleasure as an end?”

“What greater desire?” asked Sir Richmond, disconcertingly.

“Oh!...”  The doctor cast about.

“There is no such greater desire,” said Sir Richmond.  “You cannot name it.  It is just blind drive.  I admit its discontent with pleasure as an end—­but has it any end of its own?  At the most you can say that the rage in life is seeking its desire and hasn’t found it.”

“Let us help in the search,” said the doctor, with an afternoon smile under his green umbrella.  “Go on.”

Section 2

“Since our first talk in Harley Street,” said Sir Richmond, “I have been trying myself over in my mind. (We can drift down this backwater.)”

“Big these trees are,” said the doctor with infinite approval.

“I am astonished to discover what a bundle of discordant motives I am.  I do not seem to deserve to be called a personality.  I cannot discover even a general direction.  Much more am I like a taxi-cab in which all sorts of aims and desires have travelled to their destination and got out.  Are we all like that?”

“A bundle held together by a name and address and a certain thread of memory?” said the doctor and considered.  “More than that.  More than that.  We have leading ideas, associations, possessions, liabilities.”

“We build ourselves a prison of circumstances that keeps us from complete dispersal.”

“Exactly,” said the doctor.  “And there is also something, a consistency, that we call character.”

“It changes.”

“Consistently with itself.”

“I have been trying to recall my sexual history,” said Sir Richmond, going off at a tangent.  “My sentimental education.  I wonder if it differs very widely from yours or most men’s.”

“Some men are more eventful in these matters than others,” said the doctor,—­it sounded—­wistfully.

“They have the same jumble of motives and traditions, I suspect, whether they are eventful or not.  The brakes may be strong or weak but the drive is the same.  I can’t remember much of the beginnings of curiosity and knowledge in these matters.  Can you?”

“Not much,” said the doctor.  “No.”

“Your psychoanalysts tell a story of fears, suppressions, monstrous imaginations, symbolic replacements.  I don’t remember much of that sort of thing in my own case.  It may have faded out of my mind.  There were probably some uneasy curiosities, a grotesque dream or so perhaps; I can’t recall anything of that sort distinctly now.  I had a very lively interest in women, even when I was still quite a little boy, and a certain—­what shall I call it?—­imaginative slavishness—­not towards actual women but towards something magnificently feminine.  My first love—­”