In his relations with Blanche the physical side had been hardly counted
by him; he had felt passion for the first time, but so refined by his
boy's devotion that he had not given it place. He had been so aware of
what she must have had to confront from other men, and had besides
thought her so much younger than she was, that the idea of desire in
connection with her, though in the nature of things not entirely
eliminated, had yet been kept by him in the background even to himself.
He had loved Blanche as unselfishly as only a woman or a boy can love,
and now he began to suffer from it in a manner he had not at the time.

In London he had never felt any temptation to go with Killigrew when
that young man frankly announced his intention of making a night of it
with some girl he had picked up at the Café Riche or Cremorne; distaste
had been his dominant instinct, yet many of the suggestive things he had
apparently passed through unscathed came crowding back on him now. When
he was not actually driving himself to physical labour his mind would
fill with pictures that he was able to conjure up without knowing how;
sometimes Blanche would partner him in those imaginings, sometimes some
stranger woman of his invention. He felt ashamed of these ideas, but
that did not prevent them coming, and sometimes he would deliberately
give way and allow himself hours to elaborate them, from which he would
rouse himself worn out and fevered. From these mental orgies he would
feel so intense a reaction of disgust that he knew how keenly he would
feel the same if he gave way actually, in some hidden house by Penzance
harbour, where men that he knew sometimes went. Physical satisfaction
and the fact that Nature had been allowed her way would not have saved
him from the aftermath, and he did not delude himself that it would. He
looked sometimes at John-James, sitting so placidly opposite him at
meals, and wondered about him, whether his physical nature did not
perhaps follow his mental and remain untroubled. Yet this thing seemed