ady Sellingworth. That thought, too, might possibly
have come out of one of those little glasses, the one on the left. But
nevertheless it would stick in Braybrooke's mind long after the Martinis
were forgotten.

And what if it did?

Craven said that to himself, but he felt far less defiant than
sensitively uncomfortable. He was surprised by himself. Evidently he had
not known his own feelings. When Braybrooke mentioned Seymour Portman
as a suitable husband for Lady Sellingworth something strong, almost
violent, had risen up in Craven to protest. What was that? And why was
he suddenly so angry? He was surely not going to make a fool of himself.
He felt almost youthfully alarmed and also rather excited. An odd sense
of romance suddenly floated about him. Did that too come from those
cursed dry Martinis? Impossible to be sure for the moment. He found
himself wondering whether teetotallers knew more about their souls than
moderate drinkers, or less.

But the odd sense of romance persisted when the effect of the dry
Martinis must certainly have worn off. It was something such as
Craven had never known, or even imagined before. He had had his little
adventures, and about them had thrown the woven robes that gleam with
prismatic colours; he had even had deeper, passionate episodes--as he
thought them--in his life. As he had acknowledged in the _Ristorante
Bella Napoli_ he had seldom or never started on a journey abroad without
a secret hope of romance meeting him on the way. And sometimes it had
met him. Or so he had believed at the time. But in all these episodes of
the past there had been something definitely physical, something almost
horribly natural, a prompting of the body, the kind of thing which
belongs to youth, any youth, and which any doctor could explain in a few
crude words. Even then, in those now dead moments, Craven had sometimes
felt sensitive youth's impotent anger at being under the yoke which is
laid upon the necks of innumerable others, clever, dull, aristocratic,
common, the elect and the hopelessly vulgar.

In this new episode he was emancipated from that. He was able to feel
that he was peculiar, if not unique. In the strong attraction which drew
him towards Lady Sellingworth there was certainly nothing of the--well,
to himself he called it "the medically physical." Something of the body
there might possibly be. Indeed, perhaps it was impossible that there
should not be. But the predominant factor