It was the same with all the friends of other days. When he was attracted by some one Dudley initiated him into a devastating intimacy. The person, for a time, would yield to a flattering tyranny, but, in the end, would rebel against the inequality of possession. Dudley refuted all intellectual justifications of protest, and attributed the failure of his friendships to the emotional inadequacies of his disciples. When women abandoned their sexual defenses to him, however, he found nothing left to achieve. They held a view of their relationships which made the subtler kinds of personal pride unnecessary to them. If they had received in life any spiritual disfigurements, they were only too ready to expose these where it would buy them a little pity through which they might insinuate themselves into another soul. Their spiritual instincts were as promiscuous as the physical expressions of embryo life. It was only as regarded their bodies that they showed anything like reserve. Even here it was more a matter of vanity than anything else, for in surrendering themselves in the flesh the thing they seemed most to fear was that once they were revealed they would not be sufficiently admired. It was irritating to feel that when they abandoned everything to a man they but attained to a subtler possession. Not long before meeting Julia, Dudley passed through an experience in which he narrowly avoided matrimony. The girl had appeared to be peculiarly submissive to his influence; but at a time when his complacency had allowed him to feel most tender of her she had evaded him. If she had been less precipitate he would have married her. He was thankful for the circumstance which had saved him, and when he corresponded with her he called her "my dear sister," or "my very dear friend". Now that she had abandoned him he was more generous toward her than he had ever been. He knew that one could give one's self in an impersonal gesture. But it was very tricky to take from others. He wrote her that he must learn to function alone, that it was the artist's life. She could never explain to herself why it was that she resented so deeply his condemnation of his own weakness and his reiteration of his need of the isolation and suffering which would clarify his inner vision.