He could imagine that he saw female
garments on the bank, petticoats fallen in a circle, boots and
stockings hard by; he could hear the splashing of water on the other
side of the holly bushes; he could feel the weight of the nude form
slung across his shoulder as he galloped into the gloom with his prey.
And later, under the increasing stress of his adolescence, he used to
have a dread of realities--a conviction that he could not trust
himself. He thought at this period not of legends, but of facts--of
things that truly happened; of the brutality of hayfields; of a man
full of beer dealing roughly with a woman-laborer who unluckily came
in his way alone and defenceless at nightfall.
From all this kind of vague peril his wife had saved him. When in the
course of his education he read of nymphs and satyrs, and was startled
by what seemed a highly elaborated version of his own crude
imaginings, he had already, through the influence of Mavis, attained
to states of mind that rendered such suggestions powerless to stir his
pulses or warm his blood; and now, as he recognized with proud
satisfaction, he had reached a stage of development wherein the
improper advances of a thousand houris would evoke merely indignation
and repugnance.
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