imperatives of the most arbitrary appearance. What ensues? What

did ensue with us, for example? On the one hand was a great desire,

robbed of any appearance of shame and grossness by the power of

love, and on the other hand, the possible jealousy of so and so, the

disapproval of so and so, material risks and dangers. It is only in

the retrospect that we have been able to grasp something of the

effectual case against us. The social prohibition lit by the

intense glow of our passion, presented itself as preposterous,

irrational, arbitrary, and ugly, a monster fit only for mockery. We

might be ruined! Well, there is a phase in every love affair, a

sort of heroic hysteria, when death and ruin are agreeable additions

to the prospect. It gives the business a gravity, a solemnity.

Timid people may hesitate and draw back with a vague instinctive

terror of the immensity of the oppositions they challenge, but

neither Isabel nor I are timid people.

We weighed what was against us. We decided just exactly as scores

of thousands of people have decided in this very matter, that if it

were possible to keep this thing to ourselves, there was nothing

against it. And so we took our first step. With the hunger of love

in us, it was easy to conclude we might be lovers, and still keep

everything to ourselves. That cleared our minds of the one

persistent obstacle that mattered to us-the haunting presence of

Margaret.

And then we found, as all those scores of thousands of people

scattered about us have found, that we could not keep it to

ourselves. Love will out. All the rest of this story is the

chronicle of that. Love with sustained secrecy cannot be love. It

is just exactly the point people do not understand.

But before things came to that pass, some months and many phases and

a sudden journey to America intervened.

"This thing spells disaster," I said. "You are too big and Iam too

big to attempt this secrecy. Think of the intolerable possibility

of being found out! At any cost we have to stop-even at the cost

of parting."

"Just because we may be found out!"

"Just because we may be found out."

"Master, I shouldn't in the least mindbeing found out with you.

I'm afraid-I'd be proud."

"Wait till it happens."

There followed a struggle of immense insincerity between us. It is

hard to tell who urged and who resisted.

She came to me one night to the editorial room of the BLUE WEEKLY,

and argued and kissed me with wet salt lips, and wept in my arms;

she told me that now passionate longing for me and my intimate life

possessed her, so that she could not work, could not think, could

not endure other people for the love of me…

I fled absurdly. That is the secret of the futile journey to

America that puzzled all my friends.

I ran away from Isabel. I took hold of the situation with all my

strength, put in Britten with sketchy, hasty instructions to edit

the paper, and started headlong and with luggage, from which, among

other things, my shaving things were omitted, upon a tour round the

world.

Preposterous flight that was! I remember as a thing almost farcical

my explanations to Margaret, and how frantically anxious I was to

prevent the remote possibility of her coming with me, and how I

crossed in the TUSCAN, a bad, wet boat, and mixed seasickness with

ungovernable sorrow. I wept-tears. It was inexpressibly queer and

ridiculous-and, good God! how I hated my fellow-passengers!

New York inflamed and excited me for a time, and when things

slackened, I whirled westward to Chicago-eating and drinking, I

remember, in the train from shoals of little dishes, with a sort of

desperate voracity. I did the queerest things to distract myself-

no novelist would dare to invent my mental and emotional muddle.

Chicago also held me at first, amazing lapse from civilisation that

the place is! and then abruptly, with hosts expecting me, and

everything settled for some days in Denver, I found myself at the

end of my renunciations, and turned and came back headlong to

London.

Let me confess it wasn't any sense of perfect and incurable trust

and confidence that brought me back, or any idea that now I had

strength to refrain. It was a sudden realisation that after all the

separation might succeed; some careless phrasing in one of her

jealously read letters set that idea going in my mind-the haunting

perception that I might return to London and find it empty of the

Isabel who had pervaded it. Honour, discretion, the careers of both

of us, became nothing at the thought. I couldn't conceive my life

resuming there without Isabel. I couldn't, in short, stand it.

I don't even excuse my return. It is inexcusable. I ought to have

kept upon my way westward-and held out. I couldn't. I wanted

Isabel, and I wanted her so badly now that everything else in the

world was phantom-like until that want was satisfied. Perhaps you

have never wanted anything like that. I went straight to her.

But here I come to untellable things. There is no describing the

reality of love. The shapes of things are nothing, the actual