my ears.
She was the only Oxford woman who took a first that year. She spent
the summer in Scotland and Yorkshire, writing to me continually of
all she now meant to do, and stirring my imagination. She came to
London for the autumn session. For a time she stayed with old Lady
Colbeck, but she fell out with her hostess when it became clear she
wanted to write, not novels, but journalism, and then she set every
one talking by taking a flat near Victoria and installing as her
sole protector an elderly German governess she had engaged through a
scholastic agency. She began writing, not in that copious flood the
undisciplined young woman of gifts is apt to produce, but in exactly
the manner of an able young man, experimenting with forms,
developing the phrasing of opinions, taking a definite line. She
was, of course, tremendously discussed. She was disapproved of, but
she was invited out to dinner. She got rather a reputation for the
management of elderly distinguished men. It was an odd experience
to follow Margaret's soft rustle of silk into some big drawing-room
and discover my snub-nosed girl in the blue sack transformed into a
shining creature in the soft splendour of pearls and ivory-white and
lace, and with a silver band about her dusky hair.
For a time we did not meet very frequently, though always she
professed an unblushing preference for my company, and talked my
views and sought me out. Then her usefulness upon the BLUE WEEKLY
began to link us closelier. She would come up to the office, and
sit by the window, and talk over the proofs of the next week's
articles, going through my intentions with a keen investigatory
scalpel. Her talk always puts me in mind of a steel blade. Her
writing became rapidly very good; she had a wit and a turn of the
phrase that was all her own. We seemed to have forgotten the little
shadow of embarrassment that had fallen over our last meeting at
Oxford. Everything seemed natural and easy between us in those
days; a little unconventional, but that made it all the brighter.
We developed something like a custom of walks, about once a week or
so, and letters and notes became frequent. I won't pretend things
were not keenly personal between us, but they had an air of being
innocently mental. She used to call me "Master" in our talks, a
monstrous and engaging flattery, and I was inordinately proud to
have her as my pupil. Who wouldn't have been? And we went on at
that distance for a long time-until within a year of the Handitch
election.
After Lady Colbeck threw her up as altogether too "intellectual" for
comfortable control, Isabel was taken up by the Balfes in a less
formal and compromising manner, and week-ended with them and their
cousin Leonora Sparling, and spent large portions of her summer with
them in Herefordshire. There was a lover or so in that time, men
who came a little timidly at this brilliant young person with the
frank manner and the Amazonian mind, and, she declared, received her
kindly refusals with manifest relief. And Arnold Shoesmith struck
up a sort of friendship that oddly imitated mine. She took a liking
to him because he was clumsy and shy and inexpressive; she embarked
upon the dangerous interest of helping him to find his soul. I had
some twinges of jealousy about that. I didn't see the necessity of
him. He invaded her time, and I thought that might interfere with
her work. If their friendship stole some hours from Isabel's
writing, it did not for a long while interfere with our walks or our
talks, or the close intimacy we had together.
4
Then suddenly Isabel and I found ourselves passionately in love.
The change came so entirely without warning or intention that I find
it impossible now to tell the order of its phases. What disturbed
pebble started the avalanche I cannot trace. Perhaps it was simply
that the barriers between us and this masked aspect of life had been
wearing down unperceived.
And there came a change in Isabel. It was like some change in the
cycle of nature, like the onset of spring-a sharp brightness, an
uneasiness. She became restless with her work; little encounters
with men began to happen, encounters not quite in the quality of the
earlier proposals; and then came an odd incident of which she told
me, but somehow, I felt, didn't tell me completely. She told me all
she was able to tell me. She had been at a dance at the Ropers',
and a man, rather well known in London, had kissed her. The thing
amazed her beyond measure. It was the sort of thing immediately
possible between any man and any woman, that one never expects to
happen until it happens. It had the surprising effect of a judge
generally known to be bald suddenly whipping off his wig in court.
No absolutely unexpected revelation could have quite the same
quality of shock. She went through the whole thing to me with a
remarkable detachment, told me how she had felt-and the odd things
it seemed to open to her.
"I WANT to be kissed, and all that sort of thing," she avowed. "I
suppose every woman does."
She added after a pause: "And I don't want any one to do it."
This struck me as queerly expressive of the woman's attitude to
these things. "Some one presently will-solve that," I said.
"Some one will perhaps."
I was silent.
"Some one will," she said, almost viciously. "And then we'll have
to stop these walks and talks of ours, dear Master… I'll be
sorry to give them up."
"It's part of the requirements of the situation," I said, "that he
should be-oh, very interesting! He'll start, no doubt, all sorts
of new topics, and open no end of attractive vistas… You
can't, you know, always go about in a state of pupillage."
"I don't think I can," said Isabel. "But it's only just recently
I've begun to doubt about it."
I remember these things being said, but just how much we saw and
understood, and just how far we were really keeping opaque to each
other then, I cannot remember. But it must have been quite soon
after this that we spent nearly a whole day together at Kew Gardens,
with the curtains up and the barriers down, and the thing that had
happened plain before our eyes. I don't remember we ever made any