He tried to
analyse his own sensations, and it seemed to him that he rather dreaded
a meeting than desired it, and that he felt a certain humiliation for
which he could not account. In the midst of his analysis, his cigarette
went out and he sighed. He was startled by such an expression of
feeling, and tried to remember whether he had ever sighed before in his
life, but if he had, he could not recall the circumstances. He tried to
console himself with the absurd supposition that he was sleepy and that
the long-drawn breath had been only a suppressed yawn. Then he walked
on, gazing before him into the purple haze that filled the deep street
just as the sun was setting, and a vague sadness and longing touched him
which had no place in his catalogue of permissible emotions and which
were as far removed from the cold cynicism which he admired in others
and affected in himself as they were beyond the sphere of his analysis.
There is an age, not always to be fixed exactly, at which the really
masculine nature craves the society of womankind, in one shape or
another, as a necessity of existence, and by the society of womankind no
one means merely the daily and hourly social intercourse which consists
in exchanging the same set of remarks half a dozen times a day with as
many beings of gentle sex who, to the careless eye of ordinary man,
differ from each other in dress rather than in face or thought.
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