ut to me life
has very little personal significance and no value or power until it
has a woman as intermediary. Before life can talk to me and say anything
that matters a woman must be present as a medium. I don't mean that it
has no significance mentally and logically; I mean that irrationally and
emotionally it has no significance. Works of art, for example, bore me,
literature bores me, scenery bores me, even the beauty of a woman bores
me, unless I find in it some association with a woman's feeling. It
isn't that I can't tell for myself that a picture is fine or a mountain
valley lovely, but that it doesn't matter a rap to me whether it is or
whether it isn't until there is a feminine response, a sexual motif, if
you like to call it that, coming in. Whatever there is of loveliness
or pride in life doesn't LIVE for me until somehow a woman comes in and
breathes upon it the breath of life. I cannot even rest until a woman
makes holiday for me. Only one thing can I do without women and that is
work, joylessly but effectively, and latterly for some reason that it is
up to you to discover, doctor, even the power of work has gone from me."

Section 4

"This afternoon brings back to me very vividly my previous visit here.
It was perhaps a dozen or fifteen years ago. We rowed down this same
backwater. I can see my companion's hand--she had very pretty hands with
rosy palms--trailing in the water, and her shadowed face smiling quietly
under her sunshade, with little faint streaks of sunlight, reflected
from the ripples, dancing and quivering across it. She was one of those
people who seem always to be happy and to radiate happiness.

"By ordinary standards," said Sir Richmond, "she was a thoroughly bad
lot. She had about as much morality, in the narrower sense of the word,
as a monkey. And yet she stands out in my mind as one of the most honest
women I have ever met. She was certainly one of the kindest. Part of
that effect of honesty may have been due to her open brow, her candid
blue eyes, the smiling frankness of her manner.... But--no! She was
really honest.

"We drifted here as we are doing now. She pulled at the sweet rushes
and crushed them in her hand. She adds a remembered brightness to this
afternoon.

"Honest. Friendly. Of all the women I have known, this woman who was
here with me came nearest to being my friend. You know, what we call
virtue in a woman is a tremendous handicap to any real friendliness with