Somehow the whole thing seemed to have resulted from his meeting with Gideon Vetch.

It was Vetch who had "unsettled" him, who had taken the wind out of the stiff sails of his prejudices.

Had the war awakened in him, he wondered, the need of crude emotional stimulants, the dangerous allurement of the unfamiliar, the exotic?
Would it ever pass, and would life become again normal and placid without losing its zest and its interest?
For it was the zest of life, he realized, that he had encountered in Gideon Vetch.
"But you are a man," Margaret was saying plaintively.

"Everything is easier for a man.

You can go out and do things." "So can women now.