to
give you of my motives. A lot of it was terribly out of drawing."

"Facts?" asked the doctor.

"No, the facts were all right. It was the atmosphere, the
proportions.... I don't know if I gave you the effect of something Don
Juanesque?..."

"Vulgar poem," said the doctor remarkably. "I discounted that."

"Vulgar!"

"Intolerable. Byron in sexual psychology is like a stink in a kitchen."

Sir Richmond perceived he had struck upon the sort of thing that used to
be called a pet aversion.

"I don't want you to think that I run about after women in an habitual
and systematic manner. Or that I deliberately hunt them in the interests
of my work and energy. Your questions had set me theorizing about
myself. And I did my best to improvise a scheme of motives yesterday.
It was, I perceive, a jerry-built scheme, run up at short notice. My
nocturnal reflections convinced me of that. I put reason into things
that are essentially instinctive. The truth is that the wanderings of
desire have no single drive. All sorts of motives come in, high and low,
down to sheer vulgar imitativeness and competitiveness. What was true
in it all was this, that a man with any imagination in a fatigue
phase falls naturally into these complications because they are more
attractive to his type and far easier and more refreshing to the mind,
at the outset, than anything else. And they do work a sort of recovery
in him, They send him back to his work refreshed--so far, that is, as
his work is concerned."

"At the OUTSET they are easier," said the doctor.

Sir Richmond laughed. "When one is fagged it is only the outset counts.
The more tired one is the more readily one moves along the line of least
resistance....

"That is one footnote to what I said. So far as the motive of my work
goes, I think we got something like the spirit of it. What I said about
that was near the truth of things....

"But there is another set of motives altogether," Sir Richmond went on
with an air of having cleared the ground for his real business, "that I
didn't go into at all yesterday."

He considered. "It arises out of these other affairs. Before you
realize it your affections are involved. I am a man much swayed by my
affections."

Mr. Martineau glanced at him. There was a note of genuine self-reproach
in Sir Richmond's voice.

"I get fond of people. It is quite irrational, but I get fond of them.
Which is quite a different thing from the admiration and exc