your suppers. Besides, I am afraid that marriage
might cause you to develop, and then I should lose you. Marriage is a
sort of forcing house. It brings strange sins to fruit, and sometimes
strange renunciations. The renunciations of marriage are like white
lilies--bloodless, impurely pure, as anaemic as the soul of a virgin, as
cold as the face of a corpse. I should be afraid for you to marry,
Reggie! So few people have sufficient strength to resist the
preposterous claims of orthodoxy. They promise and vow three things--is
it three things you promise and vow in matrimony, Reggie?--and they keep
their promise. Nothing is so fatal to a personality as the keeping of
promises, unless it be telling the truth. To lie finely is an Art, to
tell the truth is to act according to Nature, and Nature is the first of
Philistines. Nothing on earth is so absolutely middle-class as Nature.
She always reminds me of Clement Scott's articles in the _Daily
Telegraph_. No, Reggie, do not marry unless you have the strength to
be a bad husband."

"I have no intention of being a good one," Reggie said earnestly.

His blue eyes looked strangely poetic under the frosty gleam of the
electric light, and his straight pale yellow hair shone like an aureole
round the head of some modern saint. He was eating strawberries rather
petulantly, as a child eats pills, and his cheeks were now violently
flushed. He looked younger than ever, and it was difficult to believe
that he was nearly twenty-five.

"I have no intention of being a good one. It is only people without
brains who make good husbands. Virtue is generally merely a form of
deficiency, just as vice is an assertion of intellect. Shelley showed
the poetry that was in his soul more by his treatment of Harriet than by
his writing of 'Adonais;' and if Byron had never broken his wife's
heart, he would have been forgotten even sooner than he has been. No,
Esme; I shall not make a good husband."

"Lady Locke would make a good wife."

"Yes, it is written in her face. That is the worst of virtues. They
show. One cannot conceal them."

"Yes. When I was a boy at school, I remember so well I had a virtue, and
I was terribly ashamed of it. I was fond of going to church. I can't
tell why. I think it was the music, or the painted windows, or the
precentor. He had a face like the face of seven devils, so exquisitely
chiselled. He looked as if he were always seeking rest and finding none.
He was really a