But, indeed, when we became lovers there was small thought of

Eugenics between us. Ours was a mutual and not a philoprogenitive

passion. Old Nature behind us may have had such purposes with us,

but it is not for us to annex her intentions by a moralising

afterthought. There isn't, in fact, any decent justification for us

whatever-at that the story must stand.

But if there is no justification there is at least a very effective

excuse in the mental confusedness of our time. The evasion of that

passionately thorough exposition of belief and of the grounds of

morality, which is the outcome of the mercenary religious

compromises of the late Vatican period, the stupid suppression of

anything but the most timid discussion of sexual morality in our

literature and drama, the pervading cultivated and protected muddle-

headedness, leaves mentally vigorous people with relatively enormous

possibilities of destruction and little effectivehelp. They find

themselves confronted by the habits and prejudices of manifestly

commonplace people, and by that extraordinary patched-up

Christianity, the cult of a "Bromsteadised" deity, diffused,

scattered, and aimless, which hides from examination and any

possibility of faith behind the plea of goodtaste. A god about

whom there is delicacy is far worse than no god at all. We are

FORCED to be laws unto ourselves and to live experimentally. It is

inevitable that a considerable fraction of just that bolder, more

initiatory section of the intellectual community, the section that

can least be spared from the collective life in a period of trial

and change, will drift into such emotional crises and such disaster

as overtook us. Most perhaps will escape, but many will go down,

many more than the world can spare. It is the unwritten law of all

our public life, and the same holds true of America, that an honest

open scandal ends a career. England in the last quarter of a

century has wasted half a dozen statesmen on this score; she would,

I believe, reject Nelson now if he sought to serve her. Is it

wonderful that to us fretting here in exile this should seem the

cruellest as well as the most foolish elimination of a necessary

social element? It destroys no vice; for vice hides by nature. It

not only rewards dullness as if it were positive virtue, but sets an

enormous premium upon hypocrisy. That is my case, and that is why I

am telling this side of my story with so much explicitness.

Ever since the Kinghamstead election I had maintained what seemed a

desultory friendship with Isabel. At first it was rather Isabel

kept it up than I. Whenever Margaret and I went down to that villa,

with its three or four acres of garden and shrubbery about it, which

fulfilled our election promise to live at Kinghamstead, Isabel would

turn up in a state of frank cheerfulness, rejoicing at us, and talk

all she was reading and thinking to me, and stay for all the rest of

the day. In her shameless liking for me she was as natural as a

savage. She would exercise me vigorously at tennis, while Margaret

lay and rested her back in the afternoon, or guide me for some long

ramble that dodged the suburban and congested patches of the

constituency with amazing skill. She took possession of me in that

unabashed, straight-minded way a girl will sometimes adopt with a

man, chose my path or criticised my game with a motherly solicitude

for my welfare that was absurd and delightful. And we talked. We

discussed and criticised the stories of novels, scraps of history,

pictures, social questions, socialism, the policy of the Government.

She was young and most unevenly informed, but she was amazingly

sharp and quick and good. Never before in my life had I known a

girl of her age, or a woman of her quality. I had never dreamt

there was such talk in the world. Kinghamstead became a lightless

place when she went to Oxford. Heaven knows how much that may not

have precipitated my abandonment of the seat!

She went to Ridout College, Oxford, and that certainly weighed with

me when presently after my breach with the Liberals various little

undergraduate societies began to ask for lectures and discussions.

I favoured Oxford. I declared openly I did so because of her. At

that time I think we neither of us suspected the possibility of

passion that lay like a coiled snake in the path before us. It

seemed to us that we had the quaintest, most delightful friendship

in the world; she was my pupil, and I was her guide, philosopher,

and friend. People smiled indulgently-even Margaret smiled

indulgently-at our attraction for one another.

Such friendships are not uncommon nowadays-among easy-going,

liberal-minded people. For the most part, there's no sort of harm,

as people say, in them. The two persons concerned are never

supposed to think of the passionate love that hovers so close to the

friendship, or if they do, then they banish the thought. I think we

kept the thought as permanently in exile as any one could do. If it

did in odd moments come into our heads we pretended elaborately it

wasn't there.

Only we were both very easily jealous of each other's attention, and

tremendously insistent upon each other's preference.