They drove home in a taxi, and she caressed him and soothed him and told him he was the dearest, kindest, gentlest and most considering husband any girl could have the luck to find. And once again, ominously, he was struck by the strangeness of the word husband on her lips. For a short while he was haunted by the figure of Timmis, with his disgust of women even while he loved one of them. But he shook away from that and told himself that if there was something lacking in his relations with his wife the fault must lie with him, for he at least had a certain scale of spiritual values, while she had none, nor, from her upbringing, could she have had the opportunity of discovering any in herself or her relations with those about her. She said he thought too much, but without thought, without passionate endeavor, how could marriage fail to sink into brutish habit? Was that too fastidious? Since there is an animal element in human life, were it not as well to deal with it frankly and healthily on an animal level? That offended his logic. There could be no element in life that was not harmonious with every other element. The gross indulgence of sex had always been offensive to him, a stupid protraction of the heated imprisonment of adolescence, a calamity that must result in arrested development. Marriage had forced him to think about these things, and he was determined, so far as in him lay, to think about them clearly, without dragging in literature, or sentiment, or prejudice. In marriage, admittedly, lay the highest spiritual relationship known, or ever to be known, to human beings. In marriage, obviously, the body had its share. If the body's share were regarded as separate from the rest, as an unfortunate but not unpleasant necessity, then, being separate, how could it be anything but a clog upon the full and true union? It was impossible for him to think of sex as a clot in the otherwise free mating of souls, and, indeed, his experience assured him that the exercise of his sex gave him not only the most wonderful deliverance from physical obsessions, but also from the uneasy and unprofitable brooding of the mind. But he was uneasy and anxious in his marriage, came to believe that it was because his wife was content with so little when he desired to give her so much more, and blamed himself for his apparent inability to set forth his gift of emotion and human fellowship in terms that she could understand.