represents the Absolutely Impossible. After all, one must go right into
the Wilderness to escape the conditions of that state of life to which
you happen to have been born.

Well, that speech of Molly's came out of a fascinating account my
Soldier of Fortune gave us of how he stage-managed a revolution in
South America, and of an expedition he'd made in the Andes on the
strength of a local tradition about the Incas' hidden gold. I call him
my Soldier of Fortune--though he's not in any known Army list, because
it's what he called himself. Likewise a Champion of the Dispossessed.
He has an intense sympathy with the indigenous populations, and thinks
the British system of conquering and corrupting native races simply a
disgrace to civilisation. With all of which sentiments I entirely
agree. Luke has taken to him immensely, chiefly, I fancy, because he
was once private secretary to some Administrating Rajah in an
Eastern-Archipelago or Indian Island, and as Luke is hankering after a
colonial governorship, he wants to scrape up all the information he can
about such posts.

I answered Molly that one may have a violent attraction to a man
without in the least wanting to marry him, and that relieved her mind a
little.

As for HIM, the attraction on his part seems equally violent. We do the
most shockingly unconventional things together. He tells me that I
carry him off his feet--that I've revolutionised his ideas about the
"nice English Girl" (useless to protest that I'm not an English girl
but a hybrid Celt). He says that I've wiped off his slate the scheme of
life he'd been planning for his latter years. A comfortable existence
in England--his doctor advises him to settle down in a temperate