Did that argue remarkable wisdom or defective courage, or some abnormal element in a composition otherwise deliciously mundane and human?
Charles had debated this often.

Even as a boy it had puzzled him.

As a young man he had held his own views on the subject, not without lasting effect.

For one winter he had passed at The Hard, in the fine bodily health and vigour of his early thirties, this very lack of women's society contributed, by not unnatural reaction, to force the idea of woman hauntingly upon him--thereby making possible a strange and hidden love passage off the Dead Sea fruit of which he was in process of supping here to-night.
He moved, bent forward, setting his elbows on the two chair arms, closing his eyes as he listened, and leaning his forehead upon his raised hands.

For in the plaintive voice of the moist, fitful southwesterly wind how, to his bearing, the buried, half-forgotten drama re-lived and reenacted itself! It dated far back, to a period when his career was still undetermined, hedged about by doubts and uncertainties--before the magnificent and terrible years of the Mutiny brought him, not only fame and distinction, but a power of self-expression and of plain seeing .-- Before, too, his not conspicuously happy marriage.