He was a practical man in a practical age, a surgeon with a brilliant future, a man who wanted no woman in his life to distract him, certainly not the wife of Eustace Bylant. A surgeon, of all men, should find nothing romantic in the most resplendent of women. He had cut too many of them up. They were all made precisely alike inside and if they varied in texture of skin and in feature, inches and symmetry, the best of them could be classified into types and their original purpose hadn’t deviated by a hair’s breadth. To idealize them was as nonsensical as to idealize passion and call it spiritual love. Even what personality they might possess was due to the balance of hormones in their ductless glands. Anything further was the result of imitation and artifice. Women somewhere in the dawn of time had concocted a set of tricks and some were more skillful in the use of them than others, some had a more arresting beauty, some a more powerful magnetism (super-active generative hormones), but not one of them, unless possessed of interesting abnormalities, would cut up differently from the other. They were the vehicles of the race, nothing more. Cut out the sexual organs of the most beautiful woman in the world and she would wither like a rose broken on its stem. Take them out in childhood and she would be a neuter and semi-imbecile or worse. There would be no more “soul” in her, no more ego, nor personality, than in a cadaver on the operating-table. Sterilize the Graafian follicles with the X-ray, coincidentally stimulating and proliferating the interstitial cells, and a faded woman’s beauty would not only be restored but more likely than not she would possess a magnetism lacking when the function was divided. Perhaps develop a higher “spirituality,” soaring mute aspirations: sublimation of the sex-urge. His scientific mind restored to its balance, he walked into the drawing-room where Gita sat with the candle-light playing on her white wig and golden gown, flickering in the depths of her black eyes, and, without more ado, fell incurably and uncompromisingly in love. Afterward he wondered how he had managed to confine himself to an oblique declaration, refrained from pouring his passion over her in a flood. But he had clung tenaciously to the thought of Eustace Bylant, even when she casually announced that she was entering upon a travesty of marriage. That had filled him with exultation but left him as little at liberty to speak. At the altar he renounced her, although he felt as if the world were sinking under him and left him forever suspended in space. But he looked forward to the sanity of the morrow, to daylight, to the unpicturesque garb of his matter-of-fact era. Thankfully he remembered he was to operate on a woman for cancer at ten o’clock.