less perhaps in the way of savouries, patties and entrees than was

customary. Sherry we banished, and Marsala and liqueurs, and there

was always good home-made lemonade available. No men waited, but

very expert parlourmaids. Our meat was usually Welsh mutton-I

don't know why, unless that mountains have ever been the last refuge

of the severer virtues. And we talked politics and books and ideas

and Bernard Shaw (who was a department by himself and supposed in

those days to be ethically sound at bottom), and mingled with the

intellectuals-I myself was, as it were, a promoted intellectual.

The Cramptons had a tendency to read good things aloud on their less

frequented receptions, but I have never been able to participate

submissively in this hyper-digestion of written matter, and

generally managed to provoke a disruptive debate. We were all very

earnest to make the most of ourselves and to be and do, and I wonder

still at times, with an unassuaged perplexity, how it is that in

that phase of utmost earnestness I have always seemed to myself to

be most remote from reality.

2

I look back now across the detaching intervention of sixteen crowded

years, critically and I fancy almost impartially, to those

beginnings of my married life. I try to recall something near to

their proper order the developing phases of relationship. Iam

struck most of all by the immense unpremeditated, generous-spirited

insincerities upon which Margaret and I were building.

It seems to me that here I have to tell perhaps the commonest

experience of all among married educated people, the deliberate,

shy, complex effort to fill the yawning gaps in temperament as they

appear, the sustained, failing attempt to bridge abysses, level

barriers, evade violent pressures. I have come these latter years

of my life to believe that it is possible for a man and woman to be

absolutely real with one another, to stand naked souled to each

other, unashamed and unafraid, because of the natural all-glorifying

love between them. It is possible to love and be loved untroubling,

as a bird flies through the air. But it is a rare and intricate

chance that brings two people within sight of that essential union,

and for the majority marriage must adjust itself on other terms.

Most coupled people never really look at one another. They look a

little away to preconceived ideas. And each from the first days of

love-making HIDES from the other, is afraid of disappointing, afraid

of offending, afraid of discoveries in either sense. They build not

solidly upon the rock of truth, but upon arches and pillars and

queer provisional supports that are needed to make a common

foundation, and below in the imprisoned darknesses, below the fine

fabric they sustain together begins for each of them a cavernous

hidden life. Down there things may be prowling that scarce ever

peep out to consciousness except in the grey half-light of sleepless

nights, passions that flash out for an instant in an angry glance

and are seen no more, starved victims and beautiful dreams bricked

up to die. For the most of us there is no jail delivery of those

inner depths, and the life above goes on to its honourable end.

I have told how I loved Margaret and how I came to marry her.

Perhaps already unintentionally I have indicated the quality of the

injustice our marriage did us both. There was no kindred between us

and no understanding. We were drawn to one another by the

unlikeness of our quality, by the things we misunderstood in each

other. I know a score of couples who have married in that fashion.

Modern conditions and modern ideas, and in particular the intenser

and subtler perceptions of modern life, press more and more heavily

upon a marriage tie whose fashion comes from an earlier and less

discriminating time. When the wife was her husband's subordinate,

meeting him simply and uncritically for simple ends, when marriage

was a purely domestic relationship, leaving thought and the vivid

things of life almost entirely to the unencumbered man, mental and

temperamental incompatibilities mattered comparatively little. But

now the wife, and particularly the loving childless wife,

unpremeditatedly makes a relentless demand for a complete

association, and the husband exacts unthought of delicacies of

understanding and co-operation. These are stupendous demands.

People not only think more fully and elaborately about life than

they ever did before, but marriage obliges us to make that ever more

accidented progress a three-legged race of carelessly assorted

couples…

Our very mental texture was different. I was rough-minded, to use

the phrase of William James, primary and intuitive and illogical;

she was tender-minded, logical, refined and secondary. She was

loyal to pledge and persons, sentimental and faithful; Iam loyal to