“I don’t want you to think that I run about after women in an habitual and systematic manner.  Or that I deliberately hunt them in the interests of my work and energy.  Your questions had set me theorizing about myself.  And I did my best to improvise a scheme of motives yesterday.  It was, I perceive, a jerry-built scheme, run up at short notice.  My nocturnal reflections convinced me of that.  I put reason into things that are essentially instinctive.  The truth is that the wanderings of desire have no single drive.  All sorts of motives come in, high and low, down to sheer vulgar imitativeness and competitiveness.  What was true in it all was this, that a man with any imagination in a fatigue phase falls naturally into these complications because they are more attractive to his type and far easier and more refreshing to the mind, at the outset, than anything else.  And they do work a sort of recovery in him, They send him back to his work refreshed—­so far, that is, as his work is concerned.”

“At the outset they are easier,” said the doctor.

Sir Richmond laughed.  “When one is fagged it is only the outset counts.  The more tired one is the more readily one moves along the line of least resistance....

“That is one footnote to what I said.  So far as the motive of my work goes, I think we got something like the spirit of it.  What I said about that was near the truth of things....

“But there is another set of motives altogether,” Sir Richmond went on with an air of having cleared the ground for his real business, “that I didn’t go into at all yesterday.”

He considered.  “It arises out of these other affairs.  Before you realize it your affections are involved.  I am a man much swayed by my affections.”

Mr. Martineau glanced at him.  There was a note of genuine self-reproach in Sir Richmond’s voice.

“I get fond of people.  It is quite irrational, but I get fond of them.  Which is quite a different thing from the admiration and excitement of falling in love.  Almost the opposite thing.  They cry or they come some mental or physical cropper and hurt themselves, or they do something distressingly little and human and suddenly I find they’ve got me.  I’m distressed.  I’m filled with something between pity and an impulse of responsibility.  I become tender towards them.  I am impelled to take care of them.  I want to ease them off, to reassure them, to make them stop hurting at any cost.  I don’t see why it should be the weak and sickly and seamy side of people that grips me most, but it is.  I don’t know why it should be their failures that gives them power over me, but it is.  I told you of this girl, this mistress of mine, who is ill just now.  She’s got me in that way; she’s got me tremendously.”

“You did not speak of her yesterday with any morbid excess of pity,” the doctor was constrained to remark.

“I abused her very probably.  I forget exactly what I said....”