essed soon passed away.

Why had it not been so with him? He had never had to contend with the
coarse forms of temptation of which his elders had spoken, as if they
were an integral part of his youth.

Why, then, had he loved this pretty, false, selfish woman so long? Why
had he allowed himself to be drawn back into her toils after he had
known she was false? Why was he more weak, more credulous, more
infatuated than other men?

The duke had actually been her husband, had actually possessed that
wonderful creature, and yet he, under the glamour of her personal
presence, which it made Michael gasp to think of, he, the duke, had not
been deceived.

Why had he, Michael, been deceived?

He remembered the exhortations of his tepid-minded, painlessly married
tutor at Oxford, who read the vilest French novels as a duty, and took a
walk with his wife on fine afternoons; and whose cryptic warnings on the
empire of the passions would have made a baboon blush.

Michael laughed suddenly as he recalled the mild old-maidish face. What
was the old prig talking about? What did he know, dried up and
shrivelled like a bit of seaweed between the leaves of a folio.

Everyone had told him wrong.

Why had they decried this awful power, why had they so confused it with
sensual indulgence that he had had to disentangle it for himself? Why
had they not warned him, on the contrary, that the love of woman was a
living death, a pitfall from which there was no escape, from the depths
of which you might stare at the sky till you starved to death, as he was
doing now.

With all their warnings they had not warned him, these grave men, these
instructors of youth, who had never known any world except their little
world of books, who ranged women into two camps, one in which they held
a docile Tennysonian place, as chaste adorners of the sacred home,
mothers of children, man's property, insipid angel housekeepers of his
demure middle age; the other where they were depicted as cheap, vulgar
temptresses, on a level with the wine cup and the gambling table.

Why had he allowed himself to be duped and hoodwinked by his elders and
by his own shyness, into chastity? They had entreated him to believe it
was the only happy life. _It was not._ To be faithful to his future
wife. Ha! Ha! That was the beginning of the trap, the white sand neatly
raked over the hidden gin.

If he had only lived like other men! If he had only listened to the
worst among