ol, that
knowledge of love dead and honour gone for ever floated up into my
consciousness.

"And then I felt that Amanda had cheated me! Outrageously. Abominably.

"Now, so far as my intelligence goes, there is not a cloud upon this
question. My demand upon Amanda was outrageous and I had no right
whatever to her love or loyalty. I must have that very clear....

"This aristocratic life, as I conceive it, must be, except accidentally
here and there, incompatible with the domestic life. It means going
hither and thither in the universe of thought as much as in the universe
of matter, it means adventure, it means movement and adventure that must
needs be hopelessly encumbered by an inseparable associate, it means
self-imposed responsibilities that will not fit into the welfare of a
family. In all ages, directly society had risen above the level of a
barbaric tribal village, this need of a release from the family for
certain necessary types of people has been recognized. It was
met sometimes informally, sometimes formally, by the growth and
establishment of special classes and orders, of priests, monks, nuns, of
pledged knights, of a great variety of non-family people, whose
concern was the larger collective life that opens out beyond the
simple necessities and duties and loyalties of the steading and of the
craftsman's house. Sometimes, but not always, that release took the form
of celibacy; but besides that there have been a hundred institutional
variations of the common life to meet the need of the special man,
the man who must go deep and the man who must go far. A vowed celibacy
ceased to be a tolerable rule for an aristocracy directly the eugenic
idea entered the mind of man, because a celibate aristocracy means the
abandonment of the racial future to a proletariat of base unleaderly
men. That was plain to Plato. It was plain to Campanelea. It was plain
to the Protestant reformers. But the world has never yet gone on to
the next step beyond that recognition, to the recognition of feminine
aristocrats, rulers and the mates of rulers, as untrammelled by domestic
servitudes and family relationships as the men of their kind. That I see
has always been my idea since in my undergraduate days I came under the
spell of Plato. It was a matter of course that my first gift to Amanda
should be his REPUBLIC. I loved Amanda transfigured in that dream....

"There are no such women....

"It is no excuse for me that I thought she