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Richmond. "What stands out in my memory now is this idea, of a
sort of woman goddess who was very lovely and kind and powerful and
wonderful. That ruled my secret imaginations as a boy, but it was very
much in my mind as I grew up."
    "The mother complex," said Dr. Martineau as a passing botanist might
recognize and name a flower.
    Sir Richmond stared at him for a moment.
    "It had not the slightest connexion with my mother or any mother or any
particular woman at all. Far better to call it the goddess complex."
    "The connexion is not perhaps immediately visible," said the doctor.
    "There was no connexion," said Sir Richmond. "The women of my adolescent
dreams were stripped and strong and lovely. They were great creatures.
They came, it was clearly traceable, from pictures sculpture—and from
a definite response in myself to their beauty. My mother had nothing
whatever to do with that. The women and girls about me were fussy
bunches of clothes that I am sure I never even linked with that dream
world of love and worship."
    "Were you co-educated?"
    "No. But I had a couple of sisters, one older, one younger than myself,
and there were plenty of girls in my circle. I thought some of them
pretty—but that was a different affair. I know that I didn't connect
them with the idea of the loved and worshipped goddesses at all, because
I remember when I first saw the goddess in a real human being and how
amazed I was at the discovery.... I was a boy of twelve or thirteen. My
people took me one summer to Dymchurch in Romney Marsh; in those days
before the automobile had made the Marsh accessible to the Hythe and
Folkestone crowds, it was a little old forgotten silent wind-bitten
village crouching under the lee of the great sea wall. At low water
there were miles of sand as smooth and shining as the skin of a savage
brown woman. Shining and with a texture—the very same. And one day as I
was mucking about by myself on the beach, boy fashion,—there were some
ribs of a wrecked boat buried in the sand near a groin and I was busy
with them—a girl ran out from a tent high up on the beach and across
the sands to the water. She was dressed in a tight bathing dress and
not in the clumsy skirts and frills that it was the custom to inflict
on women in those days. Her hair was tied up in a blue handkerchief. She
ran swiftly and gracefully, intent upon the white line of foam ahead. I
can still remember how the sunlight touched her round neck and cheek as
she went past me. She was the loveliest, most shapely thing I have
ever seen—to this day. She lifted up her arms and thrust through the
dazzling white and green breakers and plunged into the water and swam;
she swam straight out for a long way as it seemed to me, and presently
came in and passed me again on her way back to her tent, light and
swift and sure. The very prints of her feet on the sand were beautiful.
Suddenly I realized that there could be living people in the world as
lovely as any goddess.... She wasn't in the least out of breath.
    "That was my first human love. And I love that girl still. I doubt
sometimes whether I have ever loved anyone else. I kept the thing very
secret. I wonder now why I have kept the thing so secret. Until now I
have never told a soul about it. I resorted to all sorts of tortuous
devices and excuses to get a chance of seeing her again without
betraying what it was I was after."
    Dr. Martineau retained a simple fondness for a story.
    "And did you meet her again?"
    "Never. Of course I may have seen her as a dressed-up person and not
recognized her. A day or so later I was stabbed to the heart by the
discovery that the tent she came out of had been taken away."
    "She had gone?"
    "For ever."
    Sir Richmond smiled brightly at the doctor's disappointment.
Section 3
    "I was never wholehearted and simple about sexual things," Sir Richmond
resumed presently. "Never. I do not think any man is. We are too
much plastered-up things, too much the creatures of a tortuous