about to marry me. I put Eleanor Faversham
for ever out of my life.

I had the devotion and hero-worship of a lad whom I thought to train in
the paths of honour, love and happiness. In his eyes I suppose I am an
unconscionable villain.

I have stripped myself of everything; and all because the medical
faculty of my country sentenced me to death. I really think the Royal
Colleges of Surgeons and Physicians ought to pay me an indemnity.

And not only have I stripped myself of everything, but I have incurred
an incalculable debt. I owe a woman the infinite debt of her love which
I cannot repay. She sheds it on me hourly with a lavishness which scares
me. But for her tireless devotion, the doctor tells me, I should not
have lived. But for her selfish forbearance, sympathy, and compassion I
should have gone as crazy as Anastasius Papadopoulos. Yet the burden of
my debt lies iceberg cold on my heart. Now that we are as intimate
as man and woman who are still only friends can be, she has lost the
magnetic attraction, that subtle mystery of the woman--half goddess,
half panther--which fascinated me in spite of myself, and made
me jealous of poor young Dale. Now that I can see things in some
perspective, I confess that, had I not been under sentence of death,
and, therefore, profoundly convinced that I was immune from all such
weaknesses of the flesh, I should have realised the temptation of
languorous voice and sinuous limbs, of the frank radiation of the
animal enchanted as it was by elusive gleams of the spiritual, of the
Laisdom--in a word, of all the sexual damnability of a woman which, as
Francois Villon points out, set Sardanapalus to spin among the women,
David to forget the fear of God, Herod to slay the Baptist, and made
Samson lose his sight. Whether I should have yielded to or resisted the
temptation is another matter. Honestly speaking, I think I should have
resisted.

You see, I should still have been engaged to Eleanor Faversham. . . .
But now this somewhat unholy influence is gone from her. She has lifted
me in her strong arms as a mother would lift a brat of ten. She has
patiently suffered my whimsies as if I had been a sick girl. She has
become to me the mere great mothering creature on whom I have depended
for custard and the removal of crumbs and creases from under my body,
and for support to my tottering footsteps. The glamour has gone from
before my eyes. I no longer see her invested in her queer
splen