Page:HG Wells--secret places of the heart.djvu/73

Rh be a hard dry industry in the world, a worker ant, a soulless rage, making much, valuing nothing.”

He paused.

“You are, I think, abnormal,” considered the doctor.

“Not abnormal. Excessive, if you like. Without women I am a wasting fever of distressful toil. Without them there is no kindness in existence, no rest, no sort of satisfaction. The world is a battlefield, trenches, barbed wire, rain, mud, logical necessity and utter desolation—with nothing whatever worth fighting for. Whatever justifies effort, whatever restores energy is hidden in women....”

“An access of sex,” said Dr. Martineau. “This is a phase....”

“It is how I am made,” said Sir Richmond.

A brief silence fell upon that. Dr. Martineau persisted. “It isn’t how you are made. We are getting to something in all this. It is, I insist, a mood of how you are made. A distinctive and indicative mood.”

Sir Richmond went on, almost as if he soliloquized.

“I would go through it all again.... There are times when the love of women seems the only real thing in the world to me. And always it remains the most real thing. I do not know how far I may be a normal man or how far I may not be, so to speak, abnormally male, but to me life