is physical violence was the echo of his
mental violence. She might allow such a thing. Often, if half of what
was said of her was true, she had entered into a similar relation with
other men. He would not believe that "often." He put it differently.
She had certainly entered into a similar relation with some men--perhaps
with two or three, multiplied by scandal--in the past. Would she enter
into it with him, if he asked her? And would he ever ask her?

He threw himself down again in his arm-chair, and stared at his bare
feet planted firmly on the floor. But he saw, not his feet, but the ugly
spectre of love, that hideous, damnable ghost, that most pretentious of
all pretensions. She had lived with the ghost till she had become pale
like a ghost. In the picture of "Progress," which he loved, there was a
glow, a glory of light, raying out to a far horizon. It would be putting
a shoulder to the wheel to set a glow in the cheeks of a woman, not a
glow of shame but of joy. And to be--and then Nigel used to himself that
expression of the laughing men in the clubs--"a bad last!" No, that sort
of thing was intolerable.

Suddenly the ghost faded away, and he saw his brown feet. They made him
think at once of the sun, of work, of the good, real, glowing life.

No, no; none of those intolerable beastlinesses for him. That thought,
that imagination, it was utterly, finally done with. He drew a long
breath, and stretched up his arms, till the loose sleeves of his
night-suit fell down, exposing the strong, brown limbs. And as he had
looked at his feet, he looked at them, then felt them, thumped them, and
rejoiced in the glory of health. But the health of mind and heart was
essential to the complete health of the body. He felt suddenly
strong--strong for more than one, as surely a man should be--strong for
himself, and his woman, for her who belongs to him, who trusts him, who
has blotted out--it comes to that with a woman who loves--all other men
for him.

Was he really condemned to an eternal solitude because of the girl who
had died so many years ago? For his life was a solitude, as every
loveless life is, however brilliant and strenuous. He realized that, and
there came to him a thought that was natural and selfish. It was this:
How good it must be to be exclusively loved by a woman, and how a
woman, whom men and the world have abandoned, must love the man who
comes, like a knight through the forest, and carries her away, and