Sir Richmond looked with quick curiosity at his companion. “You have avoided them!”
“They don’t attract me.”
“They repel you?”
“For me,” said the doctor, “for any friendliness, a woman must be modest.... My habits of thought are old-fashioned, I suppose, but the mere suggestion about a woman that there were no barriers, no reservation, that in any fashion she might more than meet me half way...”
His facial expression completed his sentence.
“Now I wonder,” whispered Sir Richmond, and hesitated for a moment before he carried the great research into the explorer’s country. “You are afraid of women?” he said, with a smile to mitigate the impertinence.
“I respect them.”
“An element of fear.”
“Well, I am afraid of them then. Put it that way if you like. Anyhow I do not let myself go with them. I have never let myself go.”
“You lose something. You lose a reality of insight.”