Already I felt that land to be my home and
hated Cornwall and its bleak inhabitants. Then, at the psychological
moment, a girl woke instincts until then dormant; I was faced with
rarest good fortune and discovered a kindred spirit of the opposite
sex. That any woman lived who could see with my eyes, or share my
contempt of the trammels set round life, I did not believe until I
met with Jenny Redmayne. Women had never interested me, save in the
case of my mother, and I had seen none other with her large heart,
tolerance, humour and indifference to convention.
Then a chance friend, the brainless Robert Redmayne, brought his
niece to spend her school holiday with him and I discovered in the
seventeen-year-old schoolgirl a magnificent and pagan simplicity of
mind, combined with a Greek loveliness of body that created in me a
convulsion. From the day that we met, from the hour that I heard her
laugh at her uncle's objection to mixed bathing, I was as one
possessed; and my triumphant joy may be judged, though never
measured, when I perceived that Jenny recognized in me the
complement and precious addition unconsciously sought of her own
spirit.
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