He felt startled rather than ashamed by what arose within him; but what did trouble him, to a kind of inward fury, as he left those preoccupied girls, was the ricochet of this discovery upon his jealousy over Gerda and Bob! Who was he to indulge in sulky jealous heroics, when he himself was capable of a feeling like this? To be angry with those two, to be bitterly hurt, and yet not to be able to indulge in the undertone of his own grievance without knowing himself to be an unphilosophic fool⁠— that was the point of the spiritual wedge that now was driven into his disordered life-illusion!

Was Lord Carfax, that whimsical “man of the world,” of whom his mother loved to relate the shameless opinions, right after all? Had he always overrated the connection between sex and that mysterious struggle in the abysses, with which his “mythology” was concerned?