Page:HG Wells--secret places of the heart.djvu/182

170 interesting man in many ways. You carry marriage and—entanglements lightly. With an air of being neither married nor entangled. She is quite prepared to fall in love with you.”

“But you don’t really think that?” said Sir Richmond, with an ill-concealed eagerness.

Dr. Martineau rolled his face towards Sir Richmond. “These miracles—grotesquely—happen,” he said. “She knows nothing of Martin Leeds.... You must remember that....

“And then,” he added, “if she and you fall in love, as the phrase goes, what is to follow?”

There was a pause.

Sir Richmond looked at his toes for a moment or so as if he took counsel with them and then decided to take offence.

“Really!” he said, “this is preposterous. You talk of falling in love as though it was impossible for a man and woman to be deeply interested in each other—without that. And the gulf in our ages—in our quality! From the Psychologist of a New Age I find this amazing. Are men and women to go on for ever—separated by this possibility into two hardly communicating and yet interpenetrating worlds? Is there never to be friendship and companionship between men and women without passion?”

“You ought to know even better than I do that there is not. For such people as you two anyhow. And at present the world is not prepared to toler-