. You would have said that he was just
exactly the sort of chap that you could have trusted your wife with. And
I trusted mine and it was madness. And yet again you have me. If poor
Edward was dangerous because of the chastity of his expressions--and
they say that is always the hall-mark of a libertine--what about myself?
For I solemnly avow that not only have I never so much as hinted at an
impropriety in my conversation in the whole of my days; and more than
that, I will vouch for the cleanness of my thoughts and the absolute
chastity of my life. At what, then, does it all work out? Is the whole
thing a folly and a mockery? Am I no better than a eunuch or is the
proper man--the man with the right to existence--a raging stallion
forever neighing after his neighbour's womankind?

I don't know. And there is nothing to guide us. And if everything is
so nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex, what
is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal
contacts, associations, and activities? Or are we meant to act on
impulse alone? It is all a darkness.

II

I DON'T know how it is best to put this thing down--whether it would
be better to try and tell the story from the beginning, as if it were a
story; or whether to tell it from this distance of time, as it reached
me from the lips of Leonora or from those of Edward himself.

So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the
fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul opposite me.
And I shall go on talking, in a low voice while the sea sounds in the
distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright
stars. From time to time we shall get up and go to the door and look out
at the great moon and say: "Why, it is nearly as bright as in Provence!"
And then we shall come back to the fireside, with just the touch of a
sigh because we are not in that Provence where even the saddest stories
are gay. Consider the lamentable history of Peire Vidal. Two years ago
Florence and I motored from Biarritz to Las Tours, which is in the Black
Mountains. In the middle of a tortuous valley there rises up an immense
pinnacle and on the pinnacle are four castles--Las Tours, the Towers.
And the immense mistral blew down that valley which was the way from
France into Provence so that the silver grey olive leaves appeared like
hair flying in the wind, and the tufts of rosemary crept into the iron
rocks tha