There was no support that night in the things that had been. We

were alone together on the cliff for ever more!-that was very

pretty in its way, but it had no truth whatever that could help me

now, no ounce of sustaining value. I wanted Isabel that night, no

sentiment or memory of her, but Isabel alive,-to talk to me, to

touch me, to hold me together. I wanted unendurably the dusky

gentleness of her presence, the consolation of her voice.

We were alone together on the cliff! I startled a passing cabman

into interest by laughing aloud at that magnificent and

characteristic sentimentality. What a lie it was, and how

satisfying it had been! That was just where we shouldn't remain.

We of all people had no distinction from that humanity whose lot is

to forget. We should go out to other interests, new experiences,

new demands. That tall and intricate fabric of ambitious

understandings we had built up together in our intimacy would be the

first to go; and last perhaps to endure with us would be a few gross

memories of sights and sounds, and trivial incidental excitements…

I had a curious feeling that night that I had lost touch with life

for a long time, and had now been reminded of its quality. That

infernal little don's parody of my ruling phrase, "Hate and coarse

thinking," stuck in my thoughts like a poisoned dart, a centre of

inflammation. Just as a man who is debilitated has no longer the

vitality to resist an infection, so my mind, slackened by the crisis

of my separation from Isabel, could find no resistance to his

emphatic suggestion. It seemed to me that what he had said was

overpoweringly true, not only of contemporary life, but of all

possible human life. Love is the rare thing, the treasured thing;

you lock it away jealously and watch, and well you may; hate and

aggression and force keep the streets and rule the world. And fine

thinking is, in the rough issues of life, weak thinking, is a

balancing indecisive process, discovers with disloyal impartiality a

justice and a defect on each disputing side. "Good honest men," as

Dayton calls them, rule the world, with a way of thinking out

decisions like shooting cartloads of bricks, and with a steadfast

pleasure in hostility. Dayton liked to call his antagonists

"blaggards and scoundrels"-it justified his opposition-the Lords

were "scoundrels," all people richer than be were "scoundrels," all

Socialists, all troublesome poor people; he liked to think of jails

and justice being done. His public spirit was saturated with the

sombre joys of conflict and the pleasantthought of condign

punishment for all recalcitrant souls. That was the way of it, I

perceived. That had survival value, as the biologists say. He was

fool enough in politics to be a consistent and happy politician…

Hate and coarse thinking; how the infernal truth of the phrase beat

me down that night! I couldn't remember that I had known this all

along, and that it did not really matter in the slightest degree. I

had worked it all out long ago in other terms, when I had seen how

all parties stood for interests inevitably, and how the purpose in

life achieves itself, if it achieves itself at all, as a bye product

of the war of individuals and classes. Hadn't I always known that

science and philosophy elaborate themselves in spite of all the

passion and narrowness of men, in spite of the vanities and weakness

of their servants, in spite of all the heated disorder of

contemporary things? Wasn't it my own phrase to speak of "that

greater mind in men, in which we are but moments and transitorily

lit cells?" Hadn't I known that the spirit of man still speaks like

a thing that struggles out of mud and slime, and that the mere

effort to speak means choking and disaster? Hadn't I known that we

who think without fear and speak without discretion will not come to