Page:HG Wells--secret places of the heart.djvu/106

94 telling that my life will be nothing and mean nothing unless I bring this thing through....

“But the thanklessness of playing this lone hand!”

The doctor watched his friend’s resentful black silhouette against the lights on the steely river, and said nothing for awhile.

“Why did I ever undertake to play it?” Sir Richmond appealed. “Why has it been put upon me? Seeing what a poor thing I am, why am I not a poor thing altogether?”

“I think I understand that loneliness of yours, said the doctor after an interval.

“I am intolerable to myself.”

“And I think it explains why it is that you turn to women as you do. You want help; you want reassurance. And you feel they can give it.”

“I wonder if it has been quite like that,” Sir Richmond reflected.

By an effort Dr. Martineau refrained from mentioning the mother complex. “You want help and reassurance as a child does,” he said. “Women and women alone seem capable of giving that, of telling you that you are surely right, that notwithstanding your blunders you are right; that even when you are wrong it doesn’t so much matter, you are still in spirit right. They can show their