“You hadn’t realized that before?”

“I hadn’t thought about him sufficiently.  But now I had to think about him a lot.  The other affair had given me an idea perhaps of what it means to be married to a man.  And here I am drifting back to him.  The horrible thing about him is the steady enveloping way in which he has always come at me.  Without fellowship.  Without any community of ideas.  Ready to make the most extraordinary bargains.  So long as he can in any way fix me and get me.  What does it mean?  What is there behind those watching, soliciting eyes of his?  I don’t in the least love him, and this desire and service and all the rest of it he offers me—­it’s not love.  It’s not even such love as Caston gave me.  It’s a game he plays with his imagination.”

She had released a flood of new ideas in Sir Richmond’s mind.  “This is illuminating,” he said.  “You dislike Lake acutely.  You always have disliked him.”

“I suppose I have.  But it’s only now I admit it to myself.”

“Yes.  And you might, for example, have married him in New York before the war.”

“It came very near to that.”

“And then probably you wouldn’t have discovered you disliked him.  You wouldn’t have admitted it to yourself.”

“I suppose I shouldn’t.  I suppose I should have tried to believe I loved him.”

“Women do this sort of thing.  Odd!  I never realized it before.  And there are endless wives suppressing an acute dislike.  My wife does.  I see now quite clearly that she detests me.  Reasonably enough.  From her angle I’m entirely detestable.  But she won’t admit it, won’t know of it.  She never will.  To the end of my life, always, she will keep that detestation unconfessed.  She puts a face on the matter.  We both do.  And this affair of yours....  Have you thought how unjust it is to Lake?”

“Not nearly so much as I might have done.”

“It is unfair to him.  Atrociously unfair.  He’s not my sort of man, perhaps, but it will hurt him cruelly according to the peculiar laws of his being.  He seems to me a crawling sort of lover with an immense self-conceit at the back of his crawlingness.”

“He has,” she endorsed.

“He backs himself to crawl—­until he crawls triumphantly right over you....  I don’t like to think of the dream he has....  I take it he will lose.  Is it fair to go into this game with him?”

“In the interests of Lake,” she said, smiling softly at Sir Richmond in the moonlight.  “But you are perfectly right.”

“And suppose he doesn’t lose!”

Sir Richmond found himself uttering sentiments.

“There is only one decent way in which a civilized man and a civilized woman may approach one another.  Passionate desire is not enough.  What is called love is not enough.  Pledges, rational considerations, all these things are worthless.  All these things are compatible with hate.  The primary essential is friendship, clear understanding, absolute confidence.  Then within that condition, in that elect relationship, love is permissible, mating, marriage or no marriage, as you will—­all things are permissible....”