"I might be tempted to marry. It is perfectly possible," Lord Henry replied. "Hitherto the only thing that has deterred me has been my vanity. It would be so horrible to watch the love a woman might bear me slowly turning to indifference,--for that is what marriage means,--that I don't think I could have the courage to embark upon the undertaking." "You are flippant," said the widow sadly. "You pipe and joke while Rome is burning." "One day, of course, I shall have to marry," he muttered, as if to himself. She would have liked to ask him to Brineweald. She wanted a deep breath of him before he left. For some reason, however, for which she was not too anxious to account, she did not express this wish. "Why will you _have_ to?" she asked. "I mean," he said, "simply what I am always repeating in my clinique, that save in the case of those who are really called to celibacy,--the Newmans, the Spencers, and the Nietzsches of this world,--physical and spiritual health is difficult without a normal sexual life." "Quite so," the widow agreed. "Quite so," Lord Henry repeated, "a _normal_ sexual life." He emphasised the word "normal," hoping thereby to convey gently how hopeless her scheme was. "And when will that be?" "Oh, Heaven knows!" She rose, went to the window, and there was a pause. "Lord Henry," she began after a while, "would it seem odd to you? Would you think me shameless? Am I hopelessly abandoned, to tell you now, how very much more than mere friendship, mere gratitude I feel for you?" He buried his face in his hands and held his breath. He knew this was inevitable; but as he had already told St. Maur, he had a heart. She did not look at him, but continued speaking fluently, warmly, incisively. "Ever since I met you, I have felt what all of us women long to feel, the ridiculous inferiority of the bulk of modern men suddenly relieved by an object which we are willing to serve and obey. Your cures, if you have ever effected any in me, were just that,--not your regimens or your analyses,--but your words, your glance, the touch of your hand, your presence. Everybody knows you have a bewildering presence. I need not add to the idle compliments you must receive on all hands. But surely I have recognised the greatness beneath the outward glamour. And it has cast a spell over me. I admit it. I am fettered to it, riveted to it. We women suffer to-day because we have no such men as you to look up to. Oh, to have met for once something great, something precious, in a world where these things are so rare!" He glanced up at her. He could not help observing her spruce footgear smothered in the dust of the road, her straight proud back, her fine profile outlined against the bright colours of the chintz, and her blue-veined hands. And he felt an uncontrollable impulse to tell her how deeply he admired her.