necessarily a certain imaginative fixity. Miss Grammont has an impulsive
and adventurous character. And as I have been saying she was a spoilt
child, with no discipline.... You also are a person of high intelligence
and defective controls. She is very much at loose ends. You--on account
of the illness of that rather forgotten lady, Miss Martin Leeds--"
"Aren't you rather abusing the secrets of the confessional?"

"This IS the confessional. It closes to-morrow morning but it is the
confessional still. Look at the thing frankly. You, I say, are also at
loose ends. Can you deny it? My dear sir, don't we both know that ever
since we left London you have been ready to fall in love with any
pretty thing in petticoats that seemed to promise you three ha'porth of
kindness. A lost dog looking for a master! You're a stray man looking
for a mistress. Miss Grammont being a woman is a little more selective
than that. But if she's at a loose end as I suppose, she isn't protected
by the sense of having made her selection. And she has no preconceptions
of what she wants. You are a very interesting man in many ways. You
carry marriage and entanglements lightly. With an air of being neither
married nor entangled. She is quite prepared to fall in love with you."

"But you don't really think that?" said Sir Richmond, with an
ill-concealed eagerness.

Dr. Martineau rolled his face towards Sir Richmond. "These
miracles--grotesquely--happen," he said. "She knows nothing of Martin
Leeds.... You must remember that....

"And then," he added, "if she and you fall in love, as the phrase goes,
what is to follow?"

There was a pause.

Sir Richmond looked at his toes for a moment or so as if he took counsel
with them and then decided to take offence.

"Really!" he said, "this is preposterous. You talk of falling in love as
though it was impossible for a man and woman to be deeply interested in
each other without that. And the gulf in our ages--in our quality! From
the Psychologist of a New Age I find this amazing. Are men and women
to go on for ever--separated by this possibility into two hardly
communicating and yet interpenetrating worlds? Is there never to be
friendship and companionship between men and women without passion?"

"You ought to know even better than I do that there is not. For such
people as you two anyhow. And at present the world is not prepared to
tolerate friendship and companionship WITH that accompaniment. That is
the