I had political position.  I surrendered it as airily as I had achieved it; so airily, indeed, that I doubt whether I could regain it even had I the ambition.  For it was a game that I played, sometimes fascinating, sometimes repugnant to my fastidious sense of honourable dealing, for which I shall never recapture the mood.  Mood depends on conditions, and conditions, as I am trying to show, are changed.

I had social position.  I did not deceive myself as to its value in the cosmic scheme, but it was one of the pleasant things to which I was born, just as I was born to good food and wines and unpatched boots and the morning hot water brought into my bedroom.  I liked it.  I suspect that it has fled into eternity with the spirit of Captain Vauvenarde.  The penniless hero of an amazing scandal is not usually made an idol of by the exclusive aristocracy of Great Britain.

I had a sweet and loyal woman about to marry me.  I put Eleanor Faversham for ever out of my life.

I had the devotion and hero-worship of a lad whom I thought to train in the paths of honour, love and happiness.  In his eyes I suppose I am an unconscionable villain.

I have stripped myself of everything; and all because the medical faculty of my country sentenced me to death.  I really think the Royal Colleges of Surgeons and Physicians ought to pay me an indemnity.

And not only have I stripped myself of everything, but I have incurred an incalculable debt.  I owe a woman the infinite debt of her love which I cannot repay.  She sheds it on me hourly with a lavishness which scares me.  But for her tireless devotion, the doctor tells me, I should not have lived.  But for her selfish forbearance, sympathy, and compassion I should have gone as crazy as Anastasius Papadopoulos.  Yet the burden of my debt lies iceberg cold on my heart.  Now that we are as intimate as man and woman who are still only friends can be, she has lost the magnetic attraction, that subtle mystery of the woman—­half goddess, half panther—­which fascinated me in spite of myself, and made me jealous of poor young Dale.  Now that I can see things in some perspective, I confess that, had I not been under sentence of death, and, therefore, profoundly convinced that I was immune from all such weaknesses of the flesh, I should have realised the temptation of languorous voice and sinuous limbs, of the frank radiation of the animal enchanted as it was by elusive gleams of the spiritual, of the Laisdom—­in a word, of all the sexual damnability of a woman which, as Francois Villon points out, set Sardanapalus to spin among the women, David to forget the fear of God, Herod to slay the Baptist, and made Samson lose his sight.  Whether I should have yielded to or resisted the temptation is another matter.  Honestly speaking, I think I should have resisted.