significance mentally and logically; I mean that irrationally and emotionally it has no significance.  Works of art, for example, bore me, literature bores me, scenery bores me, even the beauty of a woman bores me, unless I find in it some association with a woman’s feeling.  It isn’t that I can’t tell for myself that a picture is fine or a mountain valley lovely, but that it doesn’t matter a rap to me whether it is or whether it isn’t until there is a feminine response, a sexual motif, if you like to call it that, coming in.  Whatever there is of loveliness or pride in life doesn’t live for me until somehow a woman comes in and breathes upon it the breath of life.  I cannot even rest until a woman makes holiday for me.  Only one thing can I do without women and that is work, joylessly but effectively, and latterly for some reason that it is up to you to discover, doctor, even the power of work has gone from me.”

Section 4

“This afternoon brings back to me very vividly my previous visit here.  It was perhaps a dozen or fifteen years ago.  We rowed down this same backwater.  I can see my companion’s hand—­she had very pretty hands with rosy palms—­trailing in the water, and her shadowed face smiling quietly under her sunshade, with little faint streaks of sunlight, reflected from the ripples, dancing and quivering across it.  She was one of those people who seem always to be happy and to radiate happiness.

“By ordinary standards,” said Sir Richmond, “she was a thoroughly bad lot.  She had about as much morality, in the narrower sense of the word, as a monkey.  And yet she stands out in my mind as one of the most honest women I have ever met.  She was certainly one of the kindest.  Part of that effect of honesty may have been due to her open brow, her candid blue eyes, the smiling frankness of her manner....  But—­no!  She was really honest.

“We drifted here as we are doing now.  She pulled at the sweet rushes and crushed them in her hand.  She adds a remembered brightness to this afternoon.

“Honest.  Friendly.  Of all the women I have known, this woman who was here with me came nearest to being my friend.  You know, what we call virtue in a woman is a tremendous handicap to any real friendliness with a man.  Until she gets to an age when virtue and fidelity are no longer urgent practical concerns, a good woman, by the very definition of feminine goodness, isn’t truly herself.  Over a vast extent of her being she is reserved. She suppresses a vast amount of her being, holds back, denies, hides.  On the other hand, there is a frankness and honesty in openly bad women arising out of the admitted fact that they are bad, that they hide no treasure from you, they have no peculiarly precious and delicious secrets to keep, and no poverty to conceal.  Intellectually they seem to be more manly and vigorous because they are, as people say, unsexed.  Many old women, thoroughly respectable old women, have the same quality.  Because they have gone out of the personal sex business.  Haven’t you found that?”