ttle mad on this point, for strong natures that
hark back to primitive types often seem a little mad to us. But at the
root of his madness there was that which no man need be ashamed of, for
it has been the very foundation of human society--the right of every
husband to keep the mother of his children from the world in his own
home. For human society existed before the Ten Commandments, and a
large part of it seems tolerably able to survive without them even now;
but no nation has ever come to any good or greatness, since the world
began, unless its men have kept their wives from other men. Yet nature
is not mocked, and woman is a match for man; she first drove him to
invent divorce for his self-defence, and see, it is a two-edged sword
in her own hands and is turned against him! No strong nation, beginning
its life and history, ever questioned the husband's right to kill the
unfaithful wife; no old and corrupt race has ever failed to make it
easy for a wife to have many husbands--including those of her friends.

Logotheti belonged to the primitives. As he had once laughingly
explained to Margaret, his people had dropped out of civilisation
during a good many centuries; they had absorbed a good deal of wild
blood in that time, and, scientifically speaking, had reverted to their
type; and now that he had chosen to mingle in the throng of the
moderns, whose fathers had lost no time in the race, while his own had
remained stationary, he found himself different from other people,
stronger than they, bolder and much more lawless, but also infinitely
more responsive to the creations of art and the facts of life, as well
as to the finer fictions of his imagination and the simple cravings of
his very masculine being.

Men who are especially gifted almost always seem exaggerated to average
society, either because, like Logotheti, they feel more, want more and
get more than other men, by sheer all-round exuberance of life and
energy, or else because, as in many great poets, some one faculty is
almost missing, which would have balanced the rest, so that in its
absence the others work at incredible speed and tension, wear
themselves out in half a lifetime and leave immortal records of their
brief activity.

There had been a time when Margaret had appealed only to Logotheti's
artistic perceptions; at their second meeting he had asked her to marry
him because he felt sure that until he could make her his permanent
possession, he c