“My dear old boy,” he said, with more earnestness than he generally displayed, “I do call myself a man of the world, for I'm in it and I love it, and I have a very decent bowing acquaintance as well with its pals, the Flesh and the Devil. I know something of men, and as for women, it has been my lot to have been petted by a good few--my size lends itself to that sort of thing. In fact, Gulliver with the Brobdingnag maids of honour is not in it with me. I know all about 'em; and I tell you, old chap, that the Beast, sometimes with a big B and sometimes in diamond type, lies in the nature of us all. There is not a living being with pure blood in his or her veins who is not overmastered at times by the principle of sex. You scoff at Bourget as a writer of morbid and impossible fiction. Look at your daily papers. Don't you see parsons of hitherto blameless lives running off with their cooks, virtuous women ruining their lives and their husbands' for the sake of some Hercules of a scoundrel--just as the patrician ladies in Rome went mad over the charioteers in the circus! Man alive! it is the Beast, the Beast that may slumber in an old maid's bosom until she is sixty and then drive her into the arms of her footman. How otherwise have you accounted for these things?” “I have not tried,” replied Kent simply. “They have not interested me. They are diseases of the brain, for the physiologist to study, like suicide and murder. I don't believe in them in normal everyday life.” There was a long pause, broken only by Wither's request that Kent should put some coals on the fire, and the rattling of the operation. Wither resumed his reading and Kent pulled at his pipe in silence. At last the former looked up and said suddenly: “Why do you think people marry?” “That's funny,” replied Kent, with a slight start. “I was just wondering myself. I don't know: money, companionship, family, idiocy--God knows what.” “It has always struck me that you would be the first of us to go,” said the other in pure, idle maliciousness. “I?” cried Kent, with a gesture of disgust. “I marry! give up my work, procreate children I couldn't support! Have to kiss and pet and fondle a woman----” “Well, you need not do that unless you like,” replied Wither, laughing in his gnomelike way. “She might expect it, but she would be soon consoled by the blessedness of pure spirituality.” Kent's reply was interrupted by the return of the absentees, Fairfax, the doctor, and Greene. “I am so glad you fellows have come back,” said Kent; “Wither has been drivelling on his favourite topic until I was beginning to loathe him.” “He's an immoral little wretch,” said the doctor, throwing his greatcoat on Wither's curled-up body--“a pocket Mephistopheles. We keep him here as a kind of Familiar. Oh, what rot dining out is!” he added, with a yawn and a stretch as he seated his burly form on the foot of the couch. “I wish I had stayed at home.”