gone two years
ago, so far that he had frequently wondered how it was that he had
not fallen. Now it was clear to him. It had been her method with
Reggy that had checked his own perilous approaches. It had offended
his fine sense of the fitting (a fastidiousness which, in one of her
moods of ungovernable frankness, she had qualified as "finicking").
For Reggy was a nice boy, and her method had somehow resulted in
making him appear not so nice. It nourished and brought to the
surface that secret, indecorous, primordial quality that he shared,
though in less splendor and abundance, with Laurence Furnival. He
had kept his head, or had seemed inimitably to have kept it. At any
rate, he had preserved his sense of decency. He was incapable of
presenting on the terrace at Amberley the flaming pageant of his
passion. Straker was not sure how far this restraint, this
level-headedness of young Reggy, had been his undoing. It might be
that Miss Tarrant had required of him a pageant. Anyhow, Reggy's
case had been very enlightening to Straker.

And it was through Reggy, or rather through his own intent and
breathless observation of the two, that Straker had received his
final illumination. It had come suddenly in one inspiring and
delivering flash; he could recall even now his subsequent
sensations, the thrilling lucidity of soul, the prodigious swiftness
of body, after his long groping in obscurities and mysteries. For it
had been a mystery to him how she had resisted Reggy in his young
physical perfection and with the charm he had, a charm that
spiritualized him, a charm that should have appealed to everything
that was supersensuous in Philippa Tarrant (and Philippa would have
had you believe that there was very little in her that was not). It
was incomprehensible therefore to Straker how any woman who had a
perfect body, with a perfect heart in it, could have resisted Reggy
at his best--and for Mr. Higginson.

To be sure, compared with Mr. Higginson he was impecunious; but
that, to Straker's mind, was just what gave him, with the other
things, his indomitable distinction. Reggy's distinction stood
straight and clean, naked of all accessories. An impecuniousness so
unexpressed, so delicate, so patrician could never have weighed with
Philippa against Reggy's charm. That she should deliberately have
reckoned up his income, compared it with Mr. Higginson's, and
deducted Reggy with the result was inconceivable. Whatever Straker
h