He put up his hand to his lips, took away the cigar, and flung it out of the window violently.  And this physical violence was the echo of his mental violence.  She might allow such a thing.  Often, if half of what was said of her was true, she had entered into a similar relation with other men.  He would not believe that “often.”  He put it differently.  She had certainly entered into a similar relation with some men—­perhaps with two or three, multiplied by scandal—­in the past.  Would she enter into it with him, if he asked her?  And would he ever ask her?

He threw himself down again in his arm-chair, and stared at his bare feet planted firmly on the floor.  But he saw, not his feet, but the ugly spectre of love, that hideous, damnable ghost, that most pretentious of all pretensions.  She had lived with the ghost till she had become pale like a ghost.  In the picture of “Progress,” which he loved, there was a glow, a glory of light, raying out to a far horizon.  It would be putting a shoulder to the wheel to set a glow in the cheeks of a woman, not a glow of shame but of joy.  And to be—­and then Nigel used to himself that expression of the laughing men in the clubs—­“a bad last!” No, that sort of thing was intolerable.

Suddenly the ghost faded away, and he saw his brown feet.  They made him think at once of the sun, of work, of the good, real, glowing life.

No, no; none of those intolerable beastlinesses for him.  That thought, that imagination, it was utterly, finally done with.  He drew a long breath, and stretched up his arms, till the loose sleeves of his night-suit fell down, exposing the strong, brown limbs.  And as he had looked at his feet, he looked at them, then felt them, thumped them, and rejoiced in the glory of health.  But the health of mind and heart was essential to the complete health of the body.  He felt suddenly strong—­strong for more than one, as surely a man should be—­strong for himself, and his woman, for her who belongs to him, who trusts him, who has blotted out—­it comes to that with a woman who loves—­all other men for him.

Was he really condemned to an eternal solitude because of the girl who had died so many years ago?  For his life was a solitude, as every loveless life is, however brilliant and strenuous.  He realized that, and there came to him a thought that was natural and selfish.  It was this:  How good it must be to be exclusively loved by a woman, and how a woman, whom men and the world have abandoned, must love the man who comes, like a knight through the forest, and carries her away, and takes her into his life, and gives her back self-respect, and a place among women, and, above all, the feeling that of all feelings a woman holds dearest, “Somebody wants me.”  It must be good to be loved as such a woman would love.  His generosity, which instinctively went out to abandoned things, walked hand in hand with man’s eternal, indestructible selfishness that night, as he thought of Mrs. Chepstow for the first time as married again to some man who cared not for the world’s opinion, or who cared for it so much as to revel in defying it.