passed me again on her way back to her tent, light and
swift and sure. The very prints of her feet on the sand were beautiful.
Suddenly I realized that there could be living people in the world as
lovely as any goddess.... She wasn't in the least out of breath.

"That was my first human love. And I love that girl still. I doubt
sometimes whether I have ever loved anyone else. I kept the thing very
secret. I wonder now why I have kept the thing so secret. Until now I
have never told a soul about it. I resorted to all sorts of tortuous
devices and excuses to get a chance of seeing her again without
betraying what it was I was after."

Dr. Martineau retained a simple fondness for a story.

"And did you meet her again?"

"Never. Of course I may have seen her as a dressed-up person and not
recognized her. A day or so later I was stabbed to the heart by the
discovery that the tent she came out of had been taken away."

"She had gone?"

"For ever."

Sir Richmond smiled brightly at the doctor's disappointment.

Section 3

"I was never wholehearted and simple about sexual things," Sir Richmond
resumed presently. "Never. I do not think any man is. We are too
much plastered-up things, too much the creatures of a tortuous and
complicated evolution."

Dr. Martineau, under his green umbrella, nodded his conceded agreement.

"This--what shall I call it?--this Dream of Women, grew up in my mind as
I grew up--as something independent of and much more important than the
reality of Women. It came only very slowly into relation with that. That
girl on the Dymchurch beach was one of the first links, but she ceased
very speedily to be real--she joined the women of dreamland at last
altogether. She became a sort of legendary incarnation. I thought of
these dream women not only as something beautiful but as something
exceedingly kind and helpful. The girls and women I met belonged to a
different creation...."

Sir Richmond stopped abruptly and rowed a few long strokes.

Dr. Martineau sought information.

"I suppose," he said, "there was a sensuous element in these dreamings?"

"Certainly. A very strong one. It didn't dominate but it was a very
powerful undertow."

"Was there any tendency in all this imaginative stuff to concentrate?
To group itself about a single figure, the sort of thing that Victorians
would have called an ideal?"

"Not a bit of it," said Sir Richmond with conviction. "There was always
a tremendous lot