a decree of exile against these things. They got their glow in high

moments of altruistic ambition-and in moments of vivid worldly

success. They sat at opposite ends of their dinner table with so

and so "captured," and so and so, flushed with a mutual approval.

They saw people in love forgetful and distraught about them, and

just put it down to forgetfulness and distraction. At any rate

Altiora manifestly viewed my situation and Margaret's with an

abnormal and entirely misleading simplicity. There was the girl,

rich, with an acceptable claim to be beautiful, shiningly virtuous,

quite capable of political interests, and there was I, talented,

ambitious and full of political and social passion, in need of just

the money, devotion and regularisation Margaret could provide. We

were both unmarried-white sheets of uninscribed paper. Was there

ever a simpler situation? What more could we possibly want?

She was even a little offended at the inconclusiveness that did not

settle things at Pangbourne. I seemed to her, I suspect, to reflect

upon her judgment and good intentions.

7

I didn't see things with Altiora's simplicity.

I admired Margaret very much, I was fully aware of all that she and

I might give each other; indeed so far as Altiora went we were quite

in agreement. But what seemed solid ground to Altiora and the

ultimate footing of her emasculated world, was to me just the

superficial covering of a gulf-oh! abysses of vague and dim, and

yet stupendously significant things.

I couldn't dismiss the interests and the passion of sex as Altiora

did. Work, I agreed, was important; career and success; but deep

unanalysable instincts told me this preoccupation was a thing quite

as important; dangerous, interfering, destructive indeed, but none

the less a dominating interest in life. I have told how flittingly

and uninvited it came like a moth from the outer twilight into my

life, how it grew in me with my manhood, how it found its way to

speech and grew daring, and led me at last to experience. After

that adventure at Locarno sex and the interests and desires of sex

never left me for long at peace. I went on with my work and my

career, and all the time it was like-like someone talking ever and

again in a room while one tries to write.

There were times when I could have wished the world a world all of

men, so greatly did this unassimilated series of motives and

curiosities hamper me; and times when I could have wished the world

all of women. I seemed always to be seeking something in women, in

girls, and I was never clear what it was I was seeking. But never-

even at my coarsest-was I moved by physical desirealone. Was I

seeking help and fellowship? Was I seeking some intimacy with

beauty? It was a thing too formless to state, that I seemed always

desiring to attain and never attaining. Waves of gross sensuousness

arose out of this preoccupation, carried me to a crisis of

gratification or disappointment that was clearly not the needed

thing; they passed and left my mind free again for a time to get on

with the permanent pursuits of my life. And then presently this

solicitude would have me again, an irrelevance as it seemed, and yet

a constantly recurring demand.

I don't want particularly to dwell upon things that are disagreeable

for others to read, but I cannot leave them out of my story and get

the right proportions of the forces Iam balancing. I was no

abnormal man, and that world of order we desire to make must be

built of such stuff as I was and am and can beget. You cannot have

a world of Baileys; it would end in one orderly generation.

Humanity is begotten in Desire, lives by Desire.

"Love which is lust, is the Lamp in the Tomb;

Love which is lust, is the Call from the Gloom."

I echo Henley.

I suppose the life of celibacy which the active, well-fed, well-

exercised and imaginatively stirred young man of the educated

classes is supposed to lead from the age of nineteen or twenty, when

Nature certainly meant him to marry, to thirty or more, when

civilisation permits him to do so, is the most impossible thing in

the world. We deal here with facts that are kept secret and

obscure, but I doubt for my own part if more than one man out of

five in our class satisfies that ideal demand. The rest are even as

I was, and Hatherleigh and Esmeer and all the men I knew. I draw no

lessons and offer no panacea; I have to tell the quality of life,

and this is how it is. This is how it will remain until men and

women have the courage to face the facts of life.

I was no systematic libertine, you must understand; things happened

to me and desire drove me. Any young man would have served for that

Locarno adventure, and after that what had been a mystic and

wonderful thing passed rapidly into a gross, manifestly misdirected

and complicating one. I can count a meagre tale of five illicit

loves in the days of my youth, to include that first experience, and