share in the joys of form, colour, sensations--
the only riches of our world of senses. A poet may be a simple being
but he is bound to be various and full of wiles, ingenious and
irritable. I reflected on the variety of ways the ingenuity of the late
bard of civilisation would be able to invent for the tormenting of his
dependants. Poets not being generally foresighted in practical affairs,
no vision of consequences would restrain him. Yes. The Fynes were
excellent people, but Mrs Fyne wasn't the daughter of a domestic tyrant
for nothing. There were no limits to her revolt. But they were
excellent people. It was clear that they must have been extremely good
to that girl whose position in the world seemed somewhat difficult, with
her face of a victim, her obvious lack of resignation and the bizarre
status of orphan "to a certain extent."

Such were my thoughts, but in truth I soon ceased to trouble about all
these people. I found that my lamp had gone out leaving behind an awful
smell. I fled from it up the stairs and went to bed in the dark. My
slumbers--I suppose the one good in pedestrian exercise, confound it, is
that it helps our natural callousness--my slumbers were deep, dreamless
and refreshing.

My appetite at breakfast was not affected by my ignorance of the facts,
motives, events and conclusions. I think that to understand everything
is not good for the intellect. A well-stocked intelligence weakens the
impulse to action; an overstocked one leads gently to idiocy. But Mrs
Fyne's individualist woman-doctrine, naively unscrupulous, flitted
through my mind. The salad of unprincipled notions she put into these
girl-friends' heads! Good innocent creature, worthy wife, excellent
mother (of the strict governess type), she was as guileless of
consequences as any determinist philosopher ever was.

"As to honour--you know--it's a very fine medieval inheritance which
women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs. Since it may be laid as a
general principle that women always get what they want we must suppose
they didn't want it. In addition they are devoid of decency. I mean
masculine decency. Cautiousness too is foreign to them--the heavy
reasonable cautiousness which is our glory. And if they had it they
would make of it a thing of passion, so that its own mother--I mean the
mother of cautiousness--wouldn't recognise it. Prudence with them is a
matter of thrill like the rest of sublunary contrivan