than any one else. Without professing to understand her or her motives, he thought of her as a consistently kind and sympathetic person. She was more than she appeared to be in the somewhat ribald crowd with which she so strangely associated, of that he was sure. His sympathy for her, as the weeks had gone by, had deepened into a kind of affection, in which, even he, with his naïve reasoning powers, recognized a filial element. In some respects, he realized, he regarded her somewhat as he might have regarded his mother, but this, for him, who had never known his mother, was a dangerous affection, the most dangerous of all. Again, the inexplicable tangle confused his thinking: how, inconceivably, he had married Alice with the idea of Campaspe paramount. And there was much more that he did not understand at all.
He wondered if Zimbule would shou'resentment, turn spiteful. Towards her, from her point of view, he had, indubitably, behaved in the shabbiest possible manner. She had gravitated towards him naturally. She did everything naturally. Campaspe was right: Zimbule was a little animal. Why had he rejected her attentions so forcibly, so rudely? He could not tell. He knew only that he was subject to extravagant reactions, insane impulses. Everybody around him seemed to take life as a matter of course. He, alone, seemed to regard it with suspicion, a suspicion, he was horrified to discover, which seemed to aggrandize with every new
