“What a muddle and mockery the whole thing is!” he cried.  “What a fumbling old fool old Mother Nature has been!  She drives us into indignity and dishonour:  and she doesn’t even get the children which are her only excuse for her mischief.  See what a fantastic thing I am when you take the machine to pieces!  I have been a busy and responsible man throughout my life.  I have handled complicated public and industrial affairs not unsuccessfully and discharged quite big obligations fully and faithfully.  And all the time, hidden away from the public eye, my life has been laced by the thread of these—­what can one call them?—­love adventures.  How many? you ask.  I don’t know.  Never have I been a whole-hearted lover; never have I been able to leave love alone....  Never has love left me alone.

“And as I am made,” said Sir Richmond with sudden insistence, “As I am made—­I do not believe that I could go on without these affairs.  I know that you will be disposed to dispute that.”

Dr. Martineau made a reassuring noise.

“These affairs are at once unsatisfying and vitally necessary.  It is only latterly that I have begun to perceive this.  Women make life for me.  Whatever they touch or see or desire becomes worth while and otherwise it is not worth while.  Whatever is lovely in my world, whatever is delightful, has been so conveyed to me by some woman.  Without the vision they give me, I should be a hard dry industry in the world, a worker ant, a soulless rage, making much, valuing nothing.”

He paused.

“You are, I think, abnormal,” considered the doctor.

“Not abnormal.  Excessive, if you like.  Without women I am a wasting fever of distressful toil.  Without them there is no kindness in existence, no rest, no sort of satisfaction.  The world is a battlefield, trenches, barbed wire, rain, mud, logical necessity and utter desolation—­with nothing whatever worth fighting for.  Whatever justifies effort, whatever restores energy is hidden in women....”

“An access of sex,” said Dr. Martineau.  “This is a phase....”

“It is how I am made,” said Sir Richmond.

A brief silence fell upon that.  Dr. Martineau persisted.  “It isn’t how you are made.  We are getting to something in all this.  It is, I insist, a mood of how you are made.  A distinctive and indicative mood.”

Sir Richmond went on, almost as if he soliloquized.

“I would go through it all again....  There are times when the love of women seems the only real thing in the world to me.  And always it remains the most real thing.  I do not know how far I may be a normal man or how far I may not be, so to speak, abnormally male, but to me life has very little personal significance and no value or power until it has a woman as intermediary.  Before life can talk to me and say anything that matters a woman must be present as a medium.  I don’t mean that it has no