I went on with my head in the air.

"You might have been caught, and that would have meant endless

trouble. You might have incurred all sorts of consequences. What

did you know about her?… We have wasted four days in that hot

close place. When we found that League of Social Service we were

talking about," he said with a determined eye upon me, "chastity

will be first among the virtues prescribed."

"I shall form a rival league," I said a little damped. "I'm hanged

if I give up a single desire in me until I know why."

He lifted his chin and stared before him through his glasses at

nothing. "There are some things," he said, "that a man who means to

work-to do great public services-MUST turn his back upon. I'm not

discussing the rights or wrongs of this sort of thing. It happens

to be the conditions we work under. It will probably always be so.

If you want to experiment in that way, if you want even to discuss

it,-out you go from political life. You must know that's so…

You're a strange man, Remington, with a kind of kink in you. You've

a sort of force. You might happen to do immense things…

Only-"

He stopped. He had said all that he had forced himself to say.

"I mean to take myself as Iam," I said. "I'm going to get

experience for humanity out of all my talents-and bury nothing."

Willersley twisted his face to its humorous expression. "I doubt if

sexual proclivities," he said drily, come within the scope of the

parable."

I let that go for a little while. Then I broke out. "Sex!" said I,

"is a fundamental thing in life. We went through all this at

Trinity. I'm going to look at it, experience it, think about it-

and get it square with the rest of life. Career and Politics must

take their chances of that. It's part of the general English

slackness that they won't look this in the face. Gods! what a

muffled time we're coming out of! Sex means breeding, and breeding

is a necessary function in a nation. The Romans broke up upon that.

The Americans fade out amidst their successes. Eugenics-"

"THAT wasn't Eugenics," said Willersley.

"It was a woman," I said after a little interval, feeling oddly that

I had failed altogether to answer him, and yet had a strong dumb

case against him.

I must go back a little way with my story. In the previous book I

have described the kind of education that happens to a man of my

class nowadays, and it has been convenient to leap a phase in my

experience that I must now set out at length. I want to tell in

this second hook how I came to marry, and to do that I must give

something of the atmosphere in which I first met my wife and some

intimations of the forces that went to her making. I met her in

Staffordshire while I was staying with that uncle of whom I have

already spoken, the uncle who sold my father's houses and settled my

mother in Penge. Margaret was twenty then and I was twenty-two.

It was just before the walking tour in Switzerland that opened up so

much of the world to me. I saw her once, for an afternoon, and

circumstances so threw her up in relief that I formed a very vivid

memory of her. She was in the sharpest contrast with the industrial

world about her; she impressed me as a dainty blue flower might do,

come upon suddenly on a clinker heap. She remained in my mind at

once a perplexing interrogation and a symbol…

But first I must tell of my Staffordshire cousins and the world that

served as a foil for her.

I first went to stay with my cousins when I was an awkward youth of

sixteen, wearing deep mourning for my mother. My uncle wanted to

talk things over with me, he said, and if he could, to persuade me

to go into business instead of going up to Cambridge.

I remember that visit on account of all sorts of novel things, but

chiefly, I think, because it was the first time I encountered

anything that deserves to be spoken of as wealth. For the first

time in my life I had to do with people who seemed to have endless

supplies of money, unlimited good clothes, numerous servants; whose

daily life was made up of things that I had hitherto considered to

be treats or exceptional extravagances. My cousins of eighteen and

nineteen took cabs, for instance, with the utmost freedom, and

travelled first-class in the local trains that run up and down the

district of the Five Towns with an entire unconsciousness of the

magnificence, as it seemed to me, of such a proceeding.

The family occupied a large villa in Newcastle, with big lawns

before it and behind, a shrubbery with quite a lot of shrubs, a

coach house and stable, and subordinate dwelling-places for the

gardener and the coachman. Every bedroom contained a gas heater and

a canopied brass bedstead, and had a little bathroom attached

equipped with the porcelain baths and fittings my uncle

manufactured, bright and sanitary and stamped with his name, and the

house was furnished throughout with chairs and tables in bright