Even as I thought of it, a revolt rose in me. The revolt of
all the higher instincts against enslavement by the lower. The
rebellion of all the intellectual impulses against being ruled by
the physical. What! weaken, enervate, starve, destroy the mental
sinews to gratify the passion for a woman? Crush down the mental
emotions to give reins to the physical? It would be the work of a
fool. A rooting-up fruit trees to clear a space for weeds. And what
of those twenty-six years of life that lay behind me? Did they count
for nothing? Was all the repression and the hard work they contained
to be flung aside now and wasted? Was the whole principle that had
shaped them, of living in and for the intellect, to be utterly
reversed now? And yet it was a wretched, poor, burdensome thing,
life, as it had been lived by me. The past years stared me in the
face mockingly. Clean, capable of being scrutinised in the sunlight,
estimable from a moral and mental standpoint, but absolutely barren
of pleasure, and, so far, barren of result. I looked at them with
little satisfaction or pride. They were as immaculate, as bare, as
denuded, as irritating, and as painful to contemplate as a chalk
cliff. The character that is summed up in the line "video meliora
proboque, detiora sequor" is supposed to be very common, and meets
with universal comprehension and commiseration.
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