He fancied himself in some subterranean place of vast dimensions, through the grim galleries of which men and women with evil faces crept like animals.

And towering above them, unreal in size, his scornful face an epitome of sin, the knout which he wielded symbolical and ghastly, driving his motley flock with the leer of the evil shepherd, was the man from whom he had already learnt to recoil with horror.

The picture came and went in a flash.
Francis found himself accepting a courteously offered cigar from his companion.
"You see, the story is very much like many others," Sir Timothy murmured, as he lit a fresh Cigar himself and leaned back with the obvious enjoyment of the cultivated smoker.

"In every country of the world, the animal world as well as the human world, the male resents his female being taken from him.

Directly he ceases to resent it, he becomes degenerate.