he had no sooner set the thought into words than he rebelled against it.  His reason told him that he would get over his unhappiness in time; if he tried with all his might he could forget her; and it would be grotesque to kill himself on account of a vulgar slut.  He had only one life, and it was madness to fling it away.  He felt that he would never overcome his passion, but he knew that after all it was only a matter of time.

He would not stay in London.  There everything reminded him of his unhappiness.  He telegraphed to his uncle that he was coming to Blackstable, and, hurrying to pack, took the first train he could.  He wanted to get away from the sordid rooms in which he had endured so much suffering.  He wanted to breathe clean air.  He was disgusted with himself.  He felt that he was a little mad.

Since he was grown up Philip had been given the best spare room at the vicarage.  It was a corner-room and in front of one window was an old tree which blocked the view, but from the other you saw, beyond the garden and the vicarage field, broad meadows.  Philip remembered the wall-paper from his earliest years.  On the walls were quaint water colours of the early Victorian period by a friend of the Vicar’s youth.  They had a faded charm.  The dressing-table was surrounded by stiff muslin.  There was an old tall-boy to put your clothes in.  Philip gave a sigh of pleasure; he had never realised that all those things meant anything to him at all.  At the vicarage life went on as it had always done.  No piece of furniture had been moved from one place to another; the Vicar ate the same things, said the same things, went for the same walk every day; he had grown a little fatter, a little more silent, a little more narrow.  He had become accustomed to living without his wife and missed her very little.  He bickered still with Josiah Graves.  Philip went to see the churchwarden.  He was a little thinner, a little whiter, a little more austere; he was autocratic still and still disapproved of candles on the altar.  The shops had still a pleasant quaintness; and Philip stood in front of that in which things useful to seamen were sold, sea-boots and tarpaulins and tackle, and remembered that he had felt there in his childhood the thrill of the sea and the adventurous magic of the unknown.

He could not help his heart beating at each double knock of the postman in case there might be a letter from Mildred sent on by his landlady in London; but he knew that there would be none.  Now that he could think it out more calmly he understood that in trying to force Mildred to love him he had been attempting the impossible.  He did not know what it was that passed from a man to a woman, from a woman to a man, and made one of them a slave:  it was convenient to call it the sexual instinct; but if it was no more than that, he did not understand why it should occasion so vehement an attraction to one person rather than another.  It was irresistible: