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even a general direction. Much more am I like a taxi-cab in which all
sorts of aims and desires have travelled to their destination and got
out. Are we all like that?"
    "A bundle held together by a name and address and a certain thread of
memory?" said the doctor and considered. "More than that. More than
that. We have leading ideas, associations, possessions, liabilities."
    "We build ourselves a prison of circumstances that keeps us from
complete dispersal."
    "Exactly," said the doctor. "And there is also something, a consistency,
that we call character."
    "It changes."
    "Consistently with itself."
    "I have been trying to recall my sexual history," said Sir Richmond,
going off at a tangent. "My sentimental education. I wonder if it
differs very widely from yours or most men's."
    "Some men are more eventful in these matters than others," said the
doctor,—it sounded—wistfully.
    "They have the same jumble of motives and traditions, I suspect, whether
they are eventful or not. The brakes may be strong or weak but the drive
is the same. I can't remember much of the beginnings of curiosity and
knowledge in these matters. Can you?"
    "Not much," said the doctor. "No."
    "Your psychoanalysts tell a story of fears, suppressions, monstrous
imaginations, symbolic replacements. I don't remember much of that sort
of thing in my own case. It may have faded out of my mind. There were
probably some uneasy curiosities, a grotesque dream or so perhaps; I
can't recall anything of that sort distinctly now. I had a very lively
interest in women, even when I was still quite a little boy, and a
certain—what shall I call it?—imaginative slavishness—not towards
actual women but towards something magnificently feminine. My first
love—"
    Sir Richmond smiled at some secret memory. "My first love was Britannia
as depicted by Tenniel in the cartoons in PUNCH. I must have been a very
little chap at the time of the Britannia affair. I just clung to her in
my imagination and did devoted things for her. Then I recall, a little
later, a secret abject adoration for the white goddesses of the Crystal
Palace. Not for any particular one of them that I can remember,—for all
of them. But I don't remember anything very monstrous or incestuous
in my childish imaginations,—such things as Freud, I understand, lays
stress upon. If there was an Oedipus complex or anything of that sort
in my case it has been very completely washed out again. Perhaps a child
which is brought up in a proper nursery of its own and sees a lot of
pictures of the nude human body, and so on, gets its mind shifted off
any possible concentration upon the domestic aspect of sex. I got to
definite knowledge pretty early. By the time I was eleven or twelve."
    "Normally?"
    "What is normally? Decently, anyhow. Here again I may be forgetting much
secret and shameful curiosity. I got my ideas into definite form out of
a little straightforward physiological teaching and some dissecting of
rats and mice. My schoolmaster was a capable sane man in advance of
his times and my people believed in him. I think much of this distorted
perverse stuff that grows up in people's minds about sex and develops
into evil vices and still more evil habits, is due to the mystery we
make about these things."
    "Not entirely," said the doctor.
    "Largely. What child under a modern upbringing ever goes through the
stuffy horrors described in James Joyce's PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A
YOUNG MAN."
    "I've not read it."
    "A picture of the Catholic atmosphere; a young soul shut up in darkness
and ignorance to accumulate filth. In the name of purity and decency and
under threats of hell fire."
    "Horrible!"
    "Quite. A study of intolerable tensions, the tensions that make young
people write unclean words in secret places."
    "Yes, we certainly ventilate and sanitate in those matters nowadays.
Where nothing is concealed, nothing can explode."
    "On the whole I came up to adolescence pretty straight and clean," said
Sir