be
equally without reproach in their infidelity ... but his instinct cried
out against it. He wanted his woman to himself even though he might not
keep himself for her alone.

"And that's the beginning and the end of the sex-question," he said. "We
simply aren't willing to let women live on our level. In theory, the man
who goes to a prostitute is as bad as she is, but in practice, we don't
believe it, and women don't believe it either, and nothing will ever
make us believe it. And it's the same with lovers and mistresses. It
simply doesn't seem decent to a man who keeps a mistress that his wife
should have a lover. You can't help having instincts!..."

5

The 'bus drove over London Bridge and presently he found himself in the
railway station. It was too early yet to eat, and he made up his mind to
go for a walk through Southwark. None of them had ever been in the
slums. They had set their minds against suggestions that they should
live in Walworth or Whitechapel or Bethnal Green in order that they
might get to know something of the lives of the very poor. "That's
simply slush," Gilbert had said. "We shouldn't live like them. We'd have
four good meals every day and baths every morning, and we'd only feel
virtuous and 'smarmy' and do-good-to-the-poor-y. My object is to get rid
of slums, not to go and live in the damn things and encourage
slum-owners by paying rent regularly. All those Settlement people ...
really, they're doing the heroic stunt for their own ends. They'll go
into parliament and say they have intimate knowledge of the way in
which the poor live because they've lived with them ... and it's all my
eye, that stuff!"

The notion had made a faint appeal to Henry, but he had not responded to
it because of the way in which the others had sneered at it and because
he liked pleasant surroundings. Once, in Dublin, he had wandered out of
St. Stephens's Green and found himself in the Combe, and the sights he
had witnessed there had sickened him so that he had hurried away, and
always thereafter had been careful not to enter side streets with which
he was not familiar. Now, he felt that he ought to see a London slum.
One had to have a point of view about poor people, and it was difficult
to have a point of view about people of whom one was almost totally
ignorant.

He walked slowly up the Borough High Street, uncertain of himself and of
the district. He would want something to eat presently, and if he were
t