as an
end--but has it any end of its own? At the most you can say that the
rage in life is seeking its desire and hasn't found it."

"Let us help in the search," said the doctor, with an afternoon smile
under his green umbrella. "Go on."

Section 2

"Since our first talk in Harley Street," said Sir Richmond, "I have been
trying myself over in my mind. (We can drift down this backwater.)"

"Big these trees are," said the doctor with infinite approval.

"I am astonished to discover what a bundle of discordant motives I am.
I do not seem to deserve to be called a personality. I cannot discover
even a general direction. Much more am I like a taxi-cab in which all
sorts of aims and desires have travelled to their destination and got
out. Are we all like that?"

"A bundle held together by a name and address and a certain thread of
memory?" said the doctor and considered. "More than that. More than
that. We have leading ideas, associations, possessions, liabilities."

"We build ourselves a prison of circumstances that keeps us from
complete dispersal."

"Exactly," said the doctor. "And there is also something, a consistency,
that we call character."

"It changes."

"Consistently with itself."

"I have been trying to recall my sexual history," said Sir Richmond,
going off at a tangent. "My sentimental education. I wonder if it
differs very widely from yours or most men's."

"Some men are more eventful in these matters than others," said the
doctor,--it sounded--wistfully.

"They have the same jumble of motives and traditions, I suspect, whether
they are eventful or not. The brakes may be strong or weak but the drive
is the same. I can't remember much of the beginnings of curiosity and
knowledge in these matters. Can you?"

"Not much," said the doctor. "No."

"Your psychoanalysts tell a story of fears, suppressions, monstrous
imaginations, symbolic replacements. I don't remember much of that sort
of thing in my own case. It may have faded out of my mind. There were
probably some uneasy curiosities, a grotesque dream or so perhaps; I
can't recall anything of that sort distinctly now. I had a very lively
interest in women, even when I was still quite a little boy, and a
certain--what shall I call it?--imaginative slavishness--not towards
actual women but towards something magnificently feminine. My first
love--"

Sir Richmond smiled at some secret memory. "My first love was Britannia
as depicted by Tenniel i