ideas and instincts, emotional and scheming. My imagination moves

in broad gestures; her's was delicate with a real dread of

extravagance. My quality is sensuous and ruled by warm impulses;

hers was discriminating and essentially inhibitory. I like the

facts of the case and to mention everything; I like naked bodies and

the jolly smells of things. She abounded in reservations, in

circumlocutions and evasions, in keenly appreciated secondary

points. Perhaps the reader knows that Tintoretto in the National

Gallery, the Origin of the Milky Way. It is an admirable test of

tempera-mental quality. In spite of my early training I have come

to regard that picture as altogether delightful; to Margaret it has

always been "needlessly offensive." In that you have our

fundamental breach. She had a habit, by no means rare, of damning

what she did not like or find sympathetic in me on the score that it

was not my "trueself," and she did not so much accept the universe

as select from it and do her best to ignore the rest. And also I

had far more initiative than had she. This is no catalogue of

rights and wrongs, or superiorities and inferiorities; it is a

catalogue of differences between two people linked in a relationship

that constantly becomes more intolerant of differences.

This is how we stood to each other, and none of it was clear to

either of us at the outset. To begin with, I found myself reserving

myself from her, then slowly apprehending a jarring between our

minds and what seemed to me at first a queer little habit of

misunderstanding in her…

It did not hinder my being very fond of her…

Where our system of reservation became at once most usual and most

astounding was in our personal relations. It is not too much to say

that in that regard we never for a moment achieved sincerity with

one another during the first six years of our life together. It

goes even deeper than that, for in my effort to realise the ideal of

my marriage I ceased even to attempt to be sincere with myself. I

would not admit my own perceptions and interpretations. I tried to

fit myself to her thinner and finer determinations. There are

people who will say with a note of approval that I was learning to

conquer myself. I record that much without any note of approval…

For some years I never deceived Margaret about any concrete fact

nor, except for the silence about my earlier life that she had

almost forced upon me, did I hide any concrete fact that seemed to

affect her, but from the outset I was guilty of immense spiritual

concealments, my very marriage was based, I see now, on a spiritual

subterfuge; I hid moods from her, pretended feelings…

3

The interest and excitement of setting-up a house, of walking about

it from room to room and from floor to floor, or sitting at one's

own dinner table and watching one's wife control conversation with a

pretty, timid resolution, of taking a place among the secure and

free people of our world, passed almost insensibly into the interest

and excitement of my Parliamentary candidature for the Kinghamstead

Division, that shapeless chunk of agricultural midland between the

Great Western and the North Western railways. I was going to "take

hold" at last, the Kinghamstead Division was my appointed handle. I

was to find my place in the rather indistinctly sketched

constructions that were implicit in the minds of all our circle.

The precise place I had to fill and the precise functions I had to

discharge were not as yet very clear, but all that, we felt sure,

would become plain as things developed.

A few brief months of vague activities of "nursing" gave place to

the excitements of the contest that followed the return of Mr.

Camphell-Bannerman to power in 1905. So far as the Kinghamstead

Division was concerned it was a depressed and tepid battle. I went

about the constituency making three speeches that were soon

threadbare, and an odd little collection of people worked for me;

two solicitors, a cheap photographer, a democratic parson, a number

of dissenting ministers, the Mayor of Kinghamstead, a Mrs. Bulger,

the widow of an old Chartist who had grown rich through electric

traction patents, Sir Roderick Newton, a Jew who had bought

Calersham Castle, and old Sir Graham Rivers, that sturdy old

soldier, were among my chief supporters. We had headquarters in

each town and village, mostly there were empty shops we leased

temporarily, and there at least a sort of fuss and a coming and

going were maintained. The rest of the population stared in a state

of suspended judgment as we went about the business. The country

was supposed to be in a state of intellectual conflict and

deliberate decision, in history it will no doubt figure as a

momentous conflict. Yet except for an occasional flare of bill-