“I have never,” said the doctor, “known what you call an openly bad woman,—­at least, at all intimately....”

Sir Richmond looked with quick curiosity at his companion.  “You have avoided them!”

“They don’t attract me.”

“They repel you?”

“For me,” said the doctor, “for any friendliness, a woman must be modest....  My habits of thought are old-fashioned, I suppose, but the mere suggestion about a woman that there were no barriers, no reservation, that in any fashion she might more than meet me half way...”

His facial expression completed his sentence.

“Now I wonder,” whispered Sir Richmond, and hesitated for a moment before he carried the great research into the explorer’s country.  “You are afraid of women?” he said, with a smile to mitigate the impertinence.

“I respect them.”

“An element of fear.”

“Well, I am afraid of them then.  Put it that way if you like.  Anyhow I do not let myself go with them.  I have never let myself go.”

“You lose something.  You lose a reality of insight.”

There was a thoughtful interval.

“Having found so excellent a friend,” said the doctor, “why did you ever part from her?”

Sir Richmond seemed indisposed to answer, but Dr. Martineau’s face remained slantingly interrogative.  He had found the effective counterattack and he meant to press it.  “I was jealous of her,” Sir Richmond admitted.  “I couldn’t stand that side of it.”

Section 5

After a meditative silence the doctor became briskly professional again.

“You care for your wife,” he said.  “You care very much for your wife.  She is, as you say, your great obligation and you are a man to respect obligations.  I grasp that.  Then you tell me of these women who have come and gone....  About them too you are perfectly frank...  There remains someone else.”  Sir Richmond stared at his physician.

“Well,” he said and laughed.  “I didn’t pretend to have made my autobiography anything more than a sketch.”

“No, but there is a special person, the current person.”

“I haven’t dilated on my present situation, I admit.”

“From some little things that have dropped from you, I should say there is a child.”

“That,” said Sir Richmond after a brief pause, “is a good guess.”

“Not older than three.”

“Two years and a half.”

“You and this lady who is, I guess, young, are separated.  At any rate, you can’t go to her.  That leaves you at loose ends, because for some time, for two or three years at least, you have ceased to be—­how shall I put it?—­an emotional wanderer.”

“I begin to respect your psychoanalysis.”

“Hence your overwhelming sense of the necessity of feminine companionship for weary men.  I guess she is a very jolly companion to be with, amusing, restful—­interesting.”