tations is the aristocratic
life to be achieved. They come in a certain order, and in that order the
spirit of man is armed against them less and less efficiently. Of fear
and my struggle against fear I have told already. I am fearful. I am a
physical coward until I can bring shame and anger to my assistance,
but in overcoming fear I have been helped by the whole body of human
tradition. Every one, the basest creatures, every Hottentot, every
stunted creature that ever breathed poison in a slum, knows that the
instinctive constitution of man is at fault here and that fear is
shameful and must be subdued. The race is on one's side. And so there is
a vast traditional support for a man against the Second Limitation, the
limitation of physical indulgence. It is not so universal as the first,
there is a grinning bawling humour on the side of grossness, but common
pride is against it. And in this matter my temperament has been my help:
I am fastidious, I eat little, drink little, and feel a shivering recoil
from excess. It is no great virtue; it happens so; it is something in
the nerves of my skin. I cannot endure myself unshaven or in any way
unclean; I am tormented by dirty hands or dirty blood or dirty memories,
and after I had once loved Amanda I could not--unless some irrational
impulse to get equal with her had caught me--have broken my faith to
her, whatever breach there was in her faith to me....

"I see that in these matters I am cleaner than most men and more easily
clean; and it may be that it is in the vein of just that distinctive
virtue that I fell so readily into a passion of resentment and anger.

"I despised a jealous man. There is a traditional discredit of jealousy,
not so strong as that against cowardice, but still very strong. But
the general contempt of jealousy is curiously wrapped up with the
supposition that there is no cause for jealousy, that it is unreasonable
suspicion. Given a cause then tradition speaks with an uncertain
voice....

"I see now that I despised jealousy because I assumed that it was
impossible for Amanda to love any one but me; it was intolerable
to imagine anything else, I insisted upon believing that she was as
fastidious as myself and as faithful as myself, made indeed after my
image, and I went on disregarding the most obvious intimations that she
was not, until that still moment in the Indian Ocean, when silently,
gently as a drowned body might rise out of the depths of a po