come. He had had no break of travel, no touch with the world; a
few foreign tours in the company of an old friend had given him nothing
but an emotional tincture of recollections and associations--a touch of
varnish, so to speak. Suddenly the remembrance of some of the things
which Jack Sandys had said that morning came back to him; "real things"
the boy had said, so lightly and yet so decisively. He wondered; had he
himself ever had any touch with realities at all? He had been touched
by no adversity or tragedy, he had been devastated by no disappointed
ambitions, shattered by no emotions. His whole life had been perfectly
under his control, and he had grown into a sort of contempt for all
unbalanced people, who were run away with by their instincts or
passions. It had been a very comfortable, sheltered, happy life; he was
sure of that; he had enjoyed his work, his relations with others, his
friendships; but had he ever come near to any fulness of living at all?
Was it not, when all was said and done, a very empty affair--void of
experience, guarded from suffering? "Suffering?" he hardly knew the
meaning of the word. Had he ever felt or suffered or rebelled? Yes,
there was one little thing. He had had a small ambition once; he had
studied comparative religion very carefully at one time to illustrate
some lectures, and a great idea had flashed across him. It was a big, a
fruitful thought; he had surveyed that strange province of human
emotion, the deepest strain of which seemed to be a disgust for
mingling with life, a loathing of bodily processes and instincts, which
drove its votaries to a deliberate sexlessness, and set them at
variance with the whole solid force of Nature, the treacherous and
alluring devices by which she drove men to reproduction with an
insatiable appetite; that mystical strain, which appeared at all times
and in all places, a spiritual rebellion against material bondage, was
not that the desperate cry of the fettered spirit? The conception of
sin, by which Nature traversed her own activities and made them
void--there was a great secret hidden here. He had determined to follow
this up, and to disguise with characteristic caution and courtesy a
daring speculation under the cloak of orthodox research.

He had begun his work in a great glow of enthusiasm; but it had been
suspended time after time. He had sketched his theory out; but it lay
there in one of his table-drawers, a skeleton not clothed with