“There was no connexion,” said Sir Richmond.  “The women of my adolescent dreams were stripped and strong and lovely.  They were great creatures.  They came, it was clearly traceable, from pictures sculpture—­and from a definite response in myself to their beauty.  My mother had nothing whatever to do with that.  The women and girls about me were fussy bunches of clothes that I am sure I never even linked with that dream world of love and worship.”

“Were you co-educated?”

“No.  But I had a couple of sisters, one older, one younger than myself, and there were plenty of girls in my circle.  I thought some of them pretty—­but that was a different affair.  I know that I didn’t connect them with the idea of the loved and worshipped goddesses at all, because I remember when I first saw the goddess in a real human being and how amazed I was at the discovery....  I was a boy of twelve or thirteen.  My people took me one summer to Dymchurch in Romney Marsh; in those days before the automobile had made the Marsh accessible to the Hythe and Folkestone crowds, it was a little old forgotten silent wind-bitten village crouching under the lee of the great sea wall.  At low water there were miles of sand as smooth and shining as the skin of a savage brown woman.  Shining and with a texture—­the very same.  And one day as I was mucking about by myself on the beach, boy fashion,—­there were some ribs of a wrecked boat buried in the sand near a groin and I was busy with them—­a girl ran out from a tent high up on the beach and across the sands to the water.  She was dressed in a tight bathing dress and not in the clumsy skirts and frills that it was the custom to inflict on women in those days.  Her hair was tied up in a blue handkerchief.  She ran swiftly and gracefully, intent upon the white line of foam ahead.  I can still remember how the sunlight touched her round neck and cheek as she went past me.  She was the loveliest, most shapely thing I have ever seen—­to this day.  She lifted up her arms and thrust through the dazzling white and green breakers and plunged into the water and swam; she swam straight out for a long way as it seemed to me, and presently came in and passed me again on her way back to her tent, light and swift and sure.  The very prints of her feet on the sand were beautiful.  Suddenly I realized that there could be living people in the world as lovely as any goddess....  She wasn’t in the least out of breath.

“That was my first human love.  And I love that girl still.  I doubt sometimes whether I have ever loved anyone else.  I kept the thing very secret.  I wonder now why I have kept the thing so secret.  Until now I have never told a soul about it.  I resorted to all sorts of tortuous devices and excuses to get a chance of seeing her again without betraying what it was I was after.”

Dr. Martineau retained a simple fondness for a story.

“And did you meet her again?”

“Never.  Of course I may have seen her as a dressed-up person and not recognized her.  A day or so later I was stabbed to the heart by the discovery that the tent she came out of had been taken away.”