But the profound impossibility of our relation was now becoming more

and more apparent to us. We found ourselves seeking justification,

clinging passionately to a situation that was coldly, pitilessly,

impossible and fated. We wanted quite intensely to live together

and have a child, but also we wanted very many other things that

were incompatible with these desires. It was extraordinarily

difficult to weigh our political and intellectual ambitions against

those intimate wishes. The weights kept altering according as one

found oneself grasping this valued thing or that. It wasn't as if

we could throw everything aside for our love, and have that as we

wanted it. Love such as we bore one another isn't altogether, or

even chiefly, a thing in itself-it is for the most part a value set

upon things. Our love was interwoven with all our other interests;

to go out of the world and live in isolation seemed to us like

killing the best parts of each other; we loved the sight of each

other engaged finely and characteristically, we knew each other best

as activities. We had no delusions about material facts; we didn't

want each other alive or dead, we wanted each other fully alive. We

wanted to do big things together, and for us to take each other

openly and desperately would leave us nothing in the world to do.

We wanted children indeed passionately, but children with every

helpful chance in the world, and children born in scandal would be

handicapped at every turn. We wanted to share a home, and not a

solitude.

And when we were at this stage of realisation, began the intimations

that we were found out, and that scandal was afoot against us…

I heard of it first from Esmeer, who deliberately mentioned it, with

that steady grey eye of his watching me, as an instance of the

preposterous falsehoods people will circulate. It came to Isabel

almost simultaneously through a married college friend, who made it

her business to demand either confirmation or denial. It filled us

both with consternation. In the surprise of the moment Isabel

admitted her secret, and her friend went off "reserving her freedom

of action."

Discovery broke out in every direction. Friends with grave faces

and an atmosphere of infinite tact invaded us both. Other friends

ceased to invade either of us. It was manifest we had become-we

knew not how-a private scandal, a subject for duologues, an

amazement, a perplexity, a vivid interest. In a few brief weeks it

seemed London passed from absolute unsuspiciousness to a chattering

exaggeration of its knowledge of our relations.

It was just the most inappropriate time for that disclosure. The

long smouldering antagonism to my endowment of motherhood ideas had

flared up into an active campaign in the EXPURGATOR, and it would be

altogether disastrous to us if I should be convicted of any personal

irregularity. It was just because of the manifest and challenging

respectability of my position that I had been able to carry the

thing as far as I had done. Now suddenly my fortunes had sprung a

leak, and scandal was pouring in… It chanced, too, that a

wave of moral intolerance was sweeping through London, one of those

waves in which the bitterness of the consciously just finds an ally

in the panic of the undiscovered. A certain Father Blodgett had

been preaching against social corruption with extraordinary force,

and had roused the Church of England people to a kind of competition

in denunciation. The old methods of the Anti-Socialist campaign had

been renewed, and had offered far too wide a scope and too tempting

an opportunity for private animosity, to be restricted to the

private affairs of the Socialists. I had intimations of an

extensive circulation of "private and confidential" letters…

I think there can be nothing else in life quite like the unnerving

realisation that rumour and scandal are afoot about one. Abruptly

one's confidence in the solidity of the universe disappears. One

walks silenced through a world that one feels to be full of

inaudible accusations. One cannot challenge the assault, get it out

into the open, separate truth and falsehood. It slinks from you,

turns aside its face. Old acquaintances suddenly evaded me, made

extraordinary excuses; men who had presumed on the verge of my world

and pestered me with an intrusive enterprise, now took the bold step

of flat repudiation. I became doubtful about the return of a nod,

retracted all those tentacles of easy civility that I had hitherto

spread to the world. I still grow warm with amazed indignation when

I recall that Edward Crampton, meeting me full on the steps of the

Climax Club, cut me dead. "By God!" I cried, and came near catching

him by the throat and wringing out of him what of all good deeds and

bad, could hearten him, a younger man than I and empty beyond

comparison, to dare to play the judge to me. And then I had an open

slight from Mrs. Millingham, whom I had counted on as one counts

upon the sunrise. I had not expected things of that sort; they were

disconcerting beyond measure; it was as if the world were giving way

beneath my feet, as though something failed in the essential

confidence of life, as though a hand of wet ice had touched my

heart. Similar things were happening to Isabel. Yet we went on

working, visiting, meeting, trying to ignore this gathering of

implacable forces against us.

For a time I was perplexed beyond measure to account for this

campaign. Then I got a clue. The centre of diffusion was the

Bailey household. The Baileys had never forgiven me my abandonment