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water colours of the early Victorian period by a friend of the
Vicar’s youth. They had a faded charm. The dressing-table
was surrounded by stiff muslin. There was an old tall-boy
to put your clothes in. Philip gave a sigh of pleasure; he had
never realised that all those things meant anything to him
at all. At the vicarage life went on as it had always done. No
piece of furniture had been moved from one place to an-
other; the Vicar ate the same things, said the same things,
went for the same walk every day; he had grown a little fat-
ter, a little more silent, a little more narrow. He had become
accustomed to living without his wife and missed her very
little. He bickered still with Josiah Graves. Philip went to
see the churchwarden. He was a little thinner, a little whiter,
a little more austere; he was autocratic still and still disap-
proved of candles on the altar. The shops had still a pleasant
quaintness; and Philip stood in front of that in which things
useful to seamen were sold, sea-boots and tarpaulins and
tackle, and remembered that he had felt there in his child-
hood the thrill of the sea and the adventurous magic of the
unknown.
He could not help his heart beating at each double knock
of the postman in case there might be a letter from Mildred
sent on by his landlady in London; but he knew that there
would be none. Now that he could think it out more calmly
he understood that in trying to force Mildred to love him
he had been attempting the impossible. He did not know
what it was that passed from a man to a woman, from a
woman to a man, and made one of them a slave: it was con-
venient to call it the sexual instinct; but if it was no more

Of Human Bondage