Rossiter for his part experienced a slackening in the tension of his mind during the same year 1912. He was touched by his wife's faint suspicion of his alienated affection and by her dogged determination to be sufficient to him as a companion and a helper; and a little ashamed at his middle-aged--he was forty-seven--infatuation for a woman who was herself well on in the thirties. There were times when a rift came in the cloud of his passion for Vivie, when he looked out dispassionately on the prospect of the rest of his life--he could hope at most for twenty more years of mental and bodily activity and energy. Was this all too brief period to be filled up with a senile renewal of sexual longing! He felt ashamed of the thoughts that had occupied so much of his mind since he had laid David Williams on the couch of his library, to find it was Vivie Warren whose arms were round his neck. He was not sorry this love for a woman he could not possess had sent him into Parliament. He was beginning to enjoy himself there. He had found himself, had lost that craven fear of the Speaker that paralyzes most new members. He knew when to speak and when to be silent; and when he spoke unsuspected gifts of biting sarcasm, clever characterization, convincing scorn of the uneducated minister type came to his aid. His tongue played round his victims, unequipped as they were with his vast experience of reality, vaguely discursive, on the surface as are most lawyers, at a loss for similes and tropes as are most men of business, or dull of wits as are most of the fine flowers of the public schools, stultified with the classics and scripture history. He knew that unless there was some radical change of government he could not be a minister; but he cared little for that. He was rich--thanks to his wife--he was recovering his influence and his European and American reputation as a great discoverer, a deep thinker. He enjoyed pulverizing the Ministry over their suffrage insincerities and displaying his contempt of the politician elected only for his money influence in borough, county, or in the subscription lists of the Chief Whip. Though his pulses still beat a little quicker when he held Vivie's hand in his at some reception of Lady Feenix's or a dinner party at the Gorings--Vivie as the child of a "fallen" woman had a prescriptive right of entrance to Diana's circle--he had not the slightest intention of running away with her, of nipping his career in two, just as he might be scaling the last heights to the citadel of fame: either as a politician of the new type, the type of high education, or as one of the giants of inductive science. Besides in 1912, if I mistake not, Dr. Smith-Woodward and Mr. Charles Dawson made that discovery of the remains of an ape-like man in the gravels of mid-Sussex; and the hounds of Anthropology went off on a new scent at full cry, Rossiter foremost in the pack.