h Lady
Sunderbund over again. At the end, as a condition indeed of his
departure, he had left things open. He had assented to certain promises.
He was to make her understand better what it was he needed. He was not
to let anything that had happened affect that "spi'tual f'enship."
She was to abandon all her plans, she was to begin again "at the ve'y
beginning." But he knew that indeed there should be no more beginning
again with her. He knew that quite beyond these questions of the
organization of a purified religion, it was time their association
ended. She had wept upon him; she had clasped both his hands at parting
and prayed to be forgiven. She was drawing him closer to her by their
very dissension. She had infected him with the softness of remorse; from
being a bright and spirited person, she had converted herself into a
warm and touching person. Her fine, bright black hair against his cheek
and the clasp of her hand on his shoulder was now inextricably in the
business. The perplexing, the astonishing thing in his situation was
that there was still a reluctance to make a conclusive breach.

He was not the first of men who have tried to find in vain how and when
a relationship becomes an entanglement. He ought to break off now, and
the riddle was just why he should feel this compunction in breaking off
now. He had disappointed her, and he ought not to have disappointed
her; that was the essential feeling. He had never realized before as
he realized now this peculiar quality of his own mind and the gulf into
which it was leading him. It came as an illuminating discovery.

He was a social animal. He had an instinctive disposition to act
according to the expectations of the people about him, whether they were
reasonable or congenial expectations or whether they were not. That, he
saw for the first time, had been the ruling motive of his life; it was
the clue to him. Man is not a reasonable creature; he is a socially
responsive creature trying to be reasonable in spite of that fact. From
the days in the rectory nursery when Scrope had tried to be a good boy
on the whole and just a little naughty sometimes until they stopped
smiling, through all his life of school, university, curacy, vicarage
and episcopacy up to this present moment, he perceived now that he had
acted upon no authentic and independent impulse. His impulse had always
been to fall in with people and satisfy them. And all the painful
conflicts of those la