t--their kindness,
plus his awkward knack of valuing their kindness at more than its face
worth. He had learnt his lesson. Never again would he be lured into the
net of feminine fickleness. When he felt the temptation rising, he would
suppress and ignore it; at any rate he would ignore it until the woman,
who was rousing his affection, had declared her intentions beyond any
chance of mistaking.

And Lady Dawn? She was in a class by herself. He held her sacred. The
mere thought that she should ever fall in love with him was
impertinence. To talk cheap sentiment would be insulting. It would cause
him to lose her friendship--a loss which he could not bear to
contemplate. It would be taking a mean advantage of a situation created
for an entirely different purpose.---- And yet, dare he trust himself,
now that he was in love with her, in the intimate aloneness of a long
night drive to London?

He rose to his feet disgusted. If this was the loss of self-control that
peace had brought, better a thousand times the rigors of the sacrifice
that was ended. Out there he had been strong; here he was a sick dog,
licking his sores and whimpering at his own shadow. Self-pity had
wrought this wholesale impotence--an impotence which was infecting the
entire world. While individuals and nations had thought only of others,
they had been valiant; they had raced in generous competition,
clean-limbed as athletes, towards the tape, where endeavor ends and
eternity commences. And now this lethargy, this cowardice--this
monstrous fat of quaking emotion!

A memory flashed back on him--an afternoon in March when he had been
obsessed by a similar discontent. It had happened in the Mall, after his
interview with Braithwaite and just before his introduction to Maisie.
He had come across a sign-board which had announced that, by following a
certain path, one would arrive at the Passport Office. That narrow
track, vanishing into the bushy greenness, had seemed to him the first
five hundred yards of the road that led to world-wideness and freedom.
At the end of it lay Samoa, Tibet, the Malay Archipelago--jeweled seas
and painted solitudes which human disillusions could not wither.
Instantly his will concentrated. By following that road he could become
lean-souled again. By reseeking hardships, he could recover his lost
discipline. The idea held him spellbound. It meant escape. It meant a
return to monasticism. Then and there he determined that he woul