cravings.  A voice within me became more and more urgent.  ’This will not do.  This is not love.  Where are your goddesses?  This is not love.’...  And I was unfaithful to my wife within four years of my marriage.  It was a sudden overpowering impulse.  But I suppose the ground had been preparing for a long time.  I forget now all the emotions of that adventure.  I suppose at the time it seemed beautiful and wonderful....  I do not excuse myself.  Still less do I condemn myself.  I put the facts before you.  So it was.”

“There were no children by your marriage?”

“Your line of thought, doctor, is too philoprogenitive.  We have had three.  My daughter was married two years ago.  She is in America.  One little boy died when he was three.  The other is in India, taking up the Mardipore power scheme again now that he is out of the army....  No, it is simply that I was hopelessly disappointed with everything that a good woman and a decent marriage had to give me.  Pure disappointment and vexation.  The anti-climax to an immense expectation built up throughout an imaginative boyhood and youth and early manhood.  I was shocked and ashamed at my own disappointment.  I thought it mean and base.  Nevertheless this orderly household into which I had placed my life, these almost methodical connubialities....”

He broke off in mid-sentence.

Dr. Martineau shook his head disapprovingly.

“No,” he said, “it wasn’t fair to your wife.”

“It was shockingly unfair.  I have always realized that.  I’ve done what I could to make things up to her....  Heaven knows what counter disappointments she has concealed....  But it is no good arguing about rights and wrongs now.  This is not an apology for my life.  I am telling you what happened.

“Not for me to judge,” said Dr. Martineau.  “Go on.”

“By marrying I had got nothing that my soul craved for, I had satisfied none but the most transitory desires and I had incurred a tremendous obligation.  That obligation didn’t restrain me from making desperate lunges at something vaguely beautiful that I felt was necessary to me; but it did cramp and limit these lunges.  So my story flops down into the comedy of the lying, cramped intrigues of a respectable, married man...I was still driven by my dream of some extravagantly beautiful inspiration called love and I sought it like an area sneak.  Gods!  What a story it is when one brings it all together!  I couldn’t believe that the glow and sweetness I dreamt of were not in the world—­somewhere.  Hidden away from me.  I seemed to catch glimpses of the dear lost thing, now in the corners of a smiling mouth, now in dark eyes beneath a black smoke of hair, now in a slim form seen against the sky.  Often I cared nothing for the woman I made love to.  I cared for the thing she seemed to be hiding from me....”

Sir Richmond’s voice altered.

“I don’t see what possible good it can do to talk over these things.”  He began to row and rowed perhaps a score of strokes.  Then he stopped and the boat drove on with a whisper of water at the bow and over the outstretched oar blades.