of marrying had been formed some little time before Mwres
threw Elizabeth's budding womanhood in his way. It was one of Bindon's
most cherished secrets that he had a considerable capacity for a pure
and simple life of a grossly sentimental type. The thought imparted a
sort of pathetic seriousness to the offensive and quite inconsequent and
unmeaning excesses, which he was pleased to regard as dashing
wickedness, and which a number of good people also were so unwise as to
treat in that desirable manner. As a consequence of these excesses, and
perhaps by reason also of an inherited tendency to early decay, his
liver became seriously affected, and he suffered increasing
inconvenience when travelling by aeroplane. It was during his
convalescence from a protracted bilious attack that it occurred to him
that in spite of all the terrible fascinations of Vice, if he found a
beautiful, gentle, good young woman of a not too violently intellectual
type to devote her life to him, he might yet be saved to Goodness, and
even rear a spirited family in his likeness to solace his declining
years. But like so many experienced men of the world, he doubted if
there were any good women. Of such as he had heard tell he was outwardly
sceptical and privately much afraid.

When the aspiring Mwres effected his introduction to Elizabeth, it
seemed to him that his good fortune was complete. He fell in love with
her at once. Of course, he had always been falling in love since he was
sixteen, in accordance with the extremely varied recipes to be found in
the accumulated literature of many centuries. But this was different.
This was real love. It seemed to him to call forth all the lurking
goodness in his nature. He felt that for her sake he could give up a way
of life that had already produced the gravest lesions on his liver and
nervous system. His imagination presented him with idyllic pictures of
the life of the reformed rake. He would never be sentimental with her,
or silly; but always a little cynical and bitter, as became the past.
Yet he was sure she would have an intuition of his real greatness and
goodness. And in due course he would confess things to her, pour his
version of what he regarded as his wickedness--showing what a complex of
Goethe, and Benvenuto Cellini, and Shelley, and all those other chaps he
really was--into her shocked, very beautiful, and no doubt sympathetic
ear. And preparatory to these things he wooed her with infinite