myself, grew and spread. My sense of the probability of a collapse

intensified. I knew indeed now, even as Willersley had prophesied

five years before, that I was entangling myself in something that

might smother all my uses in the world. Down there among those

incommunicable difficulties, I was puzzled and blundering. I was

losing my hold upon things; the chaotic and adventurous element in

life was spreading upward and getting the better of me, over-

mastering me and all my will to rule and make… And the

strength, the drugging urgency of the passion!

Margaret shone at times in my imagination like a radiant angel in a

world of mire and disorder, in a world of cravings, hot and dull red

like scars inflamed…

I suppose it was because I had so great a need of such help as her

whiteness proffered, that I could ascribe impossible perfections to

her, a power of intellect, a moral power and patience to which she,

poor fellow mortal, had indeed no claim. If only a few of us WERE

angels and freed from the tangle of effort, how easy life might be!

I wanted her so badly, so very badly, to be what I needed. I wanted

a woman to save me. I forced myself to see her as I wished to see

her. Her tepidities became infinite delicacies, her mental

vagueness an atmospheric realism. The harsh precisions of the

Baileys and Altiora's blunt directness threw up her fineness into

relief and made a grace of every weakness.

Mixed up with the memory of times when I talked with Margaret as one

talks politely to those who are hopelessly inferior in mental

quality, explaining with a false lucidity, welcoming and encouraging

the feeblest response, when possible moulding and directing, are

times when I did indeed, as the old phrase goes, worship the ground

she trod on. I was equally honest and unconscious of inconsistency

at each extreme. But in neither phase could I find it easy to make

love to Margaret. For in the first I did not want to, though I

talked abundantly to her of marriage and so forth, and was a little

puzzled at myself for not going on to some personal application, and

in the second she seemed inaccessible, I felt I must make

confessions and put things before her that would be the grossest

outrage upon the noble purity I attributed to her.

9

I went to Margaret at last to ask her to marry me, wrought up to the

mood of one who stakes his life on a cast. Separated from her, and

with the resonance of an evening of angry recriminations with Mrs.

Larrimer echoing in my mind, I discovered myself to be quite

passionately in love with Margaret. Last shreds of doubt vanished.

It has always been a feature of our relationship that Margaret

absent means more to me than Margaret present; her memory distils

from its dross and purifies in me. All my criticisms and

qualifications of her vanished into some dark corner of my mind.

She was the lady of my salvation; I must win my way to her or

perish.

I went to her at last, for all that I knew she loved me, in

passionate self-abasement, white and a-tremble. She was staying

with the Rockleys at Woking, for Shena Rockley had been at Bennett

Hall with her and they had resumed a close intimacy; and I went down

to her on an impulse, unheralded. I was kept waiting for some

minutes, I remember, in a little room upon which a conservatory

opened, a conservatory full of pots of large mauve-edged, white

cyclamens in flower. And there was a big lacquer cabinet, a Chinese

thing, I suppose, of black and gold against the red-toned wall. To

this day the thought of Margaret is inseparably bound up with the

sight of a cyclamen's back-turned petals.

She came in, looking pale and drooping rather more than usual. I

suddenly realised that Altiora's hint of a disappointment leading to

positive illness was something more than a vindictive comment. She

closed the door and came across to me and took and dropped my hand

and stood still. "What is it you want with me?" she asked.

The speech I had been turning over and over in my mind on the way

vanished at the sight of her.

"I want to talk to you," I answered lamely.

For some seconds neither of us said a word.

"I want to tell you things about my life," I began.

She answered with a scarcely audible "yes."

"I almost asked you to marry me at Pangbourne," I plunged. "I

didn't. I didn't because-because you had too much to give me."

"Too much!" she echoed, "to give you!" She had lifted her eyes to

my face and the colour was coming into her cheeks.

"Don't misunderstand me," I said hastily. "I want to tell you

things, things you don't know. Don't answer me. I want to tell

you."

She stood before the fireplace with her ultimate answer shining

through the quiet of her face. "Go on," she said, very softly. It

was so pitilessly manifest she was resolved to idealise the

situation whatever I might say. I began walking up and down the