done, a very empty affair--void of experience, guarded from
suffering? "Suffering?" he hardly knew the meaning of the word. Had
he ever felt or suffered or rebelled? Yes, there was one little
thing. He had had a small ambition once; he had studied comparative
religion very carefully at one time to illustrate some lectures,
and a great idea had flashed across him. It was a big, a fruitful
thought; he had surveyed that strange province of human emotion,
the deepest strain of which seemed to be a disgust for mingling
with life, a loathing of bodily processes and instincts, which
drove its votaries to a deliberate sexlessness, and set them at
variance with the whole solid force of Nature, the treacherous and
alluring devices by which she drove men to reproduction with an
insatiable appetite; that mystical strain, which appeared at all
times and in all places, a spiritual rebellion against material
bondage, was not that the desperate cry of the fettered spirit? The
conception of sin, by which Nature traversed her own activities and
made them void--there was a great secret hidden here. He had
determined to follow this up, and to disguise with characteristic
caution and courtesy a daring speculation under the cloak of
orthodox research.

He had begun his work in a great glow of enthusiasm; but it had
been suspended time after time. He had sketched his theory out; but
it lay there in one of his table-drawers, a skeleton not clothed
with words. Why had he let this all drop? Why had he contented
himself with the easy, sociable life? Effective though he was as a
teacher, he had no real confidence in the things which he taught.
They only seemed to him a device of reason for expending its
energies, just as men deprived by complex life of manual labour
sought to make up for the loss by the elaborate pursuit of games.