There are beings, for instance, to whom a little flirtation is a pastime, enjoyable maybe, but never to be allowed to interfere with the serious business of their lives; it is taken up or dropped whenever it pleases them, for their natures allow them so to do. On the other hand, there are others to whom a love affair, once entered upon, means a temporary enthralment of body and soul; and to this class belonged Hector Graeme. Though but ten days had elapsed since the episode of the bookmarker, he had managed, even in that short space, to forget both love of wife and his ambition, the one destroyed for ever, the other for the time superseded by a mad unreasoning desire of possession the more imperative because of the seeming impossibility of fulfilment.
The small phial, hidden away in his dressing-case, was by now almost empty. Its contents had been drawn on at the rate of three or four tabloids a night, and yet sleep, save intermittently, failed him; nor could he eat, racked as he was by the triple pangs of unsatisfied desire, impatience of the wasted present, and jealousy of the future, with its certain rivals.
Such love as this the brutal and plain-spoken call "lust," the more refined "earthly passion." Scornfully they contrast it with the sentiments they feel for their own beloved, ignoring the fact that love between man and woman, disguise it as you will, is that and that only—the sexless guardians of the harem proving this in their insensibility to the emotion—though it varies according to the nature of him or her who feels it.
Thus the dull, material being is as dull and brutish in his loves as he is in all else; the rare, steadfast nature, knowing no satiety, loves on till death; the ardent and imaginative invests his mistress with a halo of romantic fancies. And so, Hector loved Stara, with an exalted, passionate adoration, rendering him, for the time, ready and longing for any manifestation of self-sacrifice, and, as he truly believed, incapable of the very wrong to the accomplishment of which his whole present energies were nevertheless directed.
It is men like Graeme who are the only really dangerous lovemakers to pure-minded women, for apparently grossness has no part in their minds, they place their divinities on a pedestal and worship at it: not for worlds, they declare and believe, would they sully her white purity with suggestions of earthly passion. Then the time comes, and they ... do, and that far more effectually and thoroughly than doer, the ordinary commonplace lover, whose feeling, though obviously of the earth, is nevertheless healthy, and not rendered unnatural and fantastic by a fevered imagination. And so Hector vowed that Stara was, and would be always, sacred to him: he only wanted her love, that was all, and to gain this he now concentrated all the force of which his nature was capable. But the days were slipping by, the end of the journey was already in sight, and still so far, apparently, his efforts were all in vain; for, from the first, Stara had made it plain that she would have none of his lovemaking. Good friend he might be to any extent, but nothing more; and to this resolution she adhered, despite all his attempts at trespass on ground forbidden, and thereby rendered imperatively desirable.
