“The men who have cared for me and have been worth caring about,” she said, “gave me up years ago.  I mocked at them when they were in earnest, scoffed at sentiment, and told them frankly that when I married it would only be to find a refuge for broader life.  The right sort wouldn’t have anything to say to me after that, and I do not blame them.  And here is the torture of it.  I can’t stand the wrong sort near me—­physically, I mean.  Mind, I believe I’m attracted towards people with criminal tastes and propensities.  I believe that is what first led me towards Sir Timothy.  Every taste I ever had in life seems to have become besmirched.  I’m all the time full of the craving to do horrible things, but all the same I can’t bear to be touched.  That’s the torment of it.  I wonder if you can understand?”

“I think I can,” he answered.  “Your trouble lies in having the wrong friends and in lack of self-discipline.  If you were my sister, I’d take you away for a fortnight and put you on the road to being cured.”

“Then I wish I were your sister,” she sighed.

“Don’t think I’m unsympathetic,” he went on, “because I’m not.  Wait till we’ve got into the main road here and I’ll try and explain.”

They were passing along a country lane, so narrow that twigs from the hedges, wreathed here and there in wild roses, brushed almost against their cheeks.  On their left was the sound of a reaping-machine and the perfume of new-mown hay.  The sun was growing stronger at every moment.  A transitory gleam of pleasure softened her face.

“It is ages since I smelt honeysuckle,” she confessed, “except in a perfumer’s shop.  I was wondering what it reminded me of.”

“That,” he said, as they turned out into the broad main road, with its long vista of telegraph poles, “is because you have been neglecting the real for the sham, flowers themselves for their artificially distilled perfume.  What I was going to try and put into words without sounding too priggish, Lady Cynthia,” he went on, “is this.  It is just you people who are cursed with a restless brain who are in the most dangerous position, nowadays.  The things which keep us healthy and normal physically—­games, farces, dinner-parties of young people, fresh air and exercise —­are the very things which after a time fail to satisfy the person with imagination.  You want more out of life, always the something you don’t understand, the something beyond.  And so you keep on trying new things, and for every new thing you try, you drop an old one.  Isn’t it something like that?”

“I suppose it is,” she admitted wearily.

“Drugs take the place of wholesome wine,” he went on, warming to his subject.  “The hideous fascination of flirting with the uncouth or the impossible some way or another, stimulates a passion which simple means have ceased to gratify.  You seek for the unusual in every way—­in food, in the substitution of absinthe for your harmless Martini, of cocaine for your stimulating champagne.  There is a horrible wave of all this sort of thing going on to-day in many places, and I am afraid,” he concluded, “that a great many of our very nicest young women are caught up in it.”