Take, as an example, a prosperous man in the middle fifties, a politician shall we say, grey-haired, grey-bearded, with a strong, massive, heavily-lined face. His second daughter has been married for two years. He is emotionally unattached. His wife has been to him for many years little more than a companion. He can no longer live as he had lived for the ten or twelve years previously, in his daughters. He has begun to weary somewhat of the evasion, the deceit, the insincerity of party politics. He meets at a friend’s house a young girl who has ideas of going on the stage. It is not difficult to understand their attraction for one another. She is small, dainty, with light flaxen hair bobbed low at the neck, and drawn back tightly from her forehead, so that it may bunch widely like clustering flowers about her ears. Her eyes are blue, a pale, cornflower blue; she is not pretty, perhaps; she is the sort of girl who would look very ordinary in a photograph, for the charm of her features lies in their mobility. She is never still. She is listening eagerly, or talking eagerly, and her laughs are quick and short, like commas in her conversation. There is a gulf of over thirty years between them. But her innocence responds to his experience. He can teach her so much. And for him the greed of life, the curiosity, the freshness, the enthusiasm of those dancing eyes and laughing lips speak of a country in which he will never again travel. He wins her as she would be won. There is no diffidence, no hesitation in his wooing. They lunch together; there is no word of love between them. He talks of himself and not of her; of the men he has known, the places he has visited, of his early days in politics; his first campaign, that reversal of a two-thousand vote majority. He mentions casually as men of his acquaintance the great men of the hour. And, as he talks, the spell of his domination is falling over her. She does not analyse the sensation, does not ask herself whether or not she is in love with him. But she knows that here is a man to whom she could trust herself, in whose arms she would find surely, and to its full, the relief of self-surrender.