There was the effort of putting one's best physical foot in advance, the effort of keeping one's person conspicuously in evidence and one's intellect as unobtrusively in abeyance--the material effort of appearing always in one's best trousers, the moral effort of presenting always one's worst intelligence.

It had seemed to him until he met Laura--and his opinion was the effect of a limited experience upon a large philosophic ignorance--that the female sex played the part in Nature which is performed by the chorus in a Greek tragedy--that it shrilly voiced the horrors of the actual in the face of a divine indifference--and strenuously insisted upon the importance of the eternal detail.

From Connie he had gathered that the feminine mind tended naturally toward a material philosophy--toward a deification of the body, a faith in the fugitive allurement of the senses, and because of his earlier initiation he had taken Laura's intellectual radiance as the shining of a virtually disembodied spirit.

His own senses had led him, he recognised now, to disastrous issues; his love for Connie had been the prompting of mere physical impulse, and he had emerged from it with a feeling of escaping into freedom.

Too much Nature he had learned during those months of mental apathy is in its way quite as destructive as too little--there must be a soul in desire to keep it alive, he understood at last, or the perishing body of it will decay for lack of a vital flame in the very hour of its fulfilment.