neighbourhood. One invaded type, resentful under research,
described them with a dreadful aptness as Donna Quixote and Sancho
Panza-and himself as a harmless windmill, hurting no one and
signifying nothing. She did rather tilt at things. This particular
summer they were at a pleasant farmhouse in level country near
Pangbourne, belonging to the Hon. Wilfrid Winchester, and they asked
me to come down to rooms in the neighbourhood-Altiora took them for
a month for me in August-and board with them upon extremely
reasonable terms; and when I got there I found Margaret sitting in a
hammock at Altiora's feet. Lots of people, I gathered, were coming
and going in the neighbourhood, the Ponts were in a villa on the
river, and the Rickhams' houseboat was to moor for some days; but
these irruptions did not impede a great deal of duologue between
Margaret and myself.
Altiora was efficient rather than artistic in her match-making. She
sent us off for long walks together-Margaret was a fairly good
walker-she exhumed some defective croquet things and incited us to
croquet, not understanding that detestable game is the worst
stimulant for lovers in the world. And Margaret and I were always
getting left about, and finding ourselves for odd half-hours in the
kitchen-garden with nothing to do except talk, or we were told with
a wave of the hand to run away and amuse each other.
Altiora even tried a picnic in canoes, knowing from fiction rather
than imagination or experience the conclusive nature of such
excursions. But there she fumbled at the last moment, and elected
at the river's brink to share a canoe with me. Bailey showed so
much zeal and so little skill-his hat fell off and he became
miraculously nothing but paddle-clutching hands and a vast wrinkled
brow-that at last he had to be paddled ignominiously by Margaret,
while Altiora, after a phase of rigid discretion, as nearly as
possible drowned herself-and me no doubt into the bargain-with a
sudden lateral gesture of the arm to emphasise the high note with
which she dismissed the efficiency of the Charity Organisation
Society. We shipped about an inch of water and sat in it for the
rest of the time, an inconvenience she disregarded heroically. We
had difficulties in landing Oscar from his frail craft upon the ait
of our feasting,-he didn't balance sideways and was much alarmed,
and afterwards, as Margaret had a pain in her back, I took him in my
canoe, let him hide his shame with an ineffectual but not positively
harmful paddle, and towed the other by means of the joined painters.
Still it was the fault of the inadequate information supplied in the
books and not of Altiora that that was not the date of my betrothal.
I find it not a little difficult to state what kept me back from
proposing marriage to Margaret that summer, and what urged me
forward at last to marry her. It is so much easier to remember
one's resolutions than to remember the moods and suggestions that
produced them.
Marrying and getting married was, I think, a pretty simple affair to
Altiora; it was something that happened to the adolescent and
unmarried when you threw them together under the circumstances of
health, warmth and leisure. It happened with the kindly and
approving smiles of the more experienced elders who had organised
these proximities. The young people married, settled down, children
ensued, and father and mother turned their minds, now decently and
properly disillusioned, to other things. That to Altiora was the
normal sexual life, and she believed it to be the quality of the
great bulk of the life about her.
One of the great barriers to human understanding is the wide
temperamental difference one finds in the values of things relating
to sex. It is the issue upon which people most need training in
charity and imaginative sympathy. Here are no universal standards
at all, and indeed for no single man nor woman does there seem to be
any fixed standard, so much do the accidents of circumstances and
one's physical phases affect one's interpretations. There is
nothing in the whole range of sexual fact that may not seem
supremely beautiful or humanly jolly or magnificently wicked or
disgusting or trivial or utterly insignificant, according to the eye
that sees or the mood that colours. Here is something that may fill
the skies and every waking hour or be almost completely banished
from a life. It may be everything on Monday and less than nothing
on Saturday. And we make our laws and rules as though in these
matters all men and women were commensurable one with another, with
an equal steadfast passion and an equal constant duty…
I don't know what dreams Altiora may have had in her schoolroom
days, I always suspected her of suppressed and forgotten phases, but
certainly her general effect now was of an entirely passionless
worldliness in these matters. Indeed so far as I could get at her,
she regarded sexual passion as being hardly more legitimate in a
civilised person than-let us say-homicidal mania. She must have
forgotten-and Bailey too. I suspect she forgot before she married
him. I don't suppose either of them had the slightest intimation of
the dimensions sexual love can take in the thoughts of the great
majority of people with whom they come in contact. They loved in
their way-an intellectual way it was and a fond way-but it had no
relation to beauty and physical sensation-except that there seemed