prehistoric instinct, and if she can't be obtained in fair fight then you secure her by strategy. And if a man cannot keep her once he has secured her, it is up to him. If I had a wife, I should take good care that she _desired_ no other man--but if I bored her, or was a cold and bad lover, I should not expect the other men not to try and take her from me--because I should know this was a natural instinct with them--like taking food. It would probably be no temptation to most of us to steal gold lying about in a room, even if we were poor, but a hideous temptation to refrain from eating a tempting dish if we were starving with hunger and it was before us--and if a woman did succumb to some new passion I should blame myself, not her." Denzil agreed. "Jealousy is a natural instinct, though," he said, "and although there would be not much profit in trying to hold a woman who no longer cared, one could not help being mad about it." "Of course not--that is the sense of personal possession which is affronted. Vanity is deeply wounded, and so the power to analyse cause and result sleeps. But this attitude which men take up of neglecting a woman and then expecting her to be faithful still is quite ridiculous, and without logic; they are as usual fogged by convention and can't see straight." Verisschenzko's rough voice was keen--compelling. Denzil smiled. "Another of your windmills to fight!" "I am always fighting convention and shams. Get down to the meaning of a thing, and if its true significance coincides with the convention which surrounds it, then let that hold, but if convention is a super-imposed growth, then amputate it and study the thing without it." "I suppose a man marries a woman nine times out of ten because he cannot obtain her in any other way; then when he has become indifferent by possession, he still thinks that she should remain devoted to him. You are right, Stepan, it is very illogical." "Club the creature, or keep her in a cage if you want fidelity through fear, but don't expect it if you allow her to remain at large and neglected, and don't be such an ass as to imagine that your friends won't act just as you yourself would act were she some one's else wife. If a woman has that quality in her which arouses sex, married or single, I never have observed that men refrained from making love to her." "All this means that you consider I am quite at liberty to make love to Amaryllis Ardayre!" "Quite." Denzil threw his cigarette end into the fire: "Well, for once you are wrong, Stepan, in your usually perfect deductions," he got up from his chair. "There is a reason in this case which makes the thing an absolute impossibility; under no possible circumstance while John is alive could I make the smallest advance towards Amaryllis! There is another point of honour involved in the affair."