attitude to me that something in my nature answered and approved.
She didn't pretend to keep it up that she had yielded to my
initiative. "I've done you no harm," she said a little doubtfully,
an odd note for a man's victim! And, "we've had a good time. You
have liked me, haven't you?"
She interested me in her lonely dissatisfied life; she was childless
and had no hope of children, and her husband was the only son of a
rich meat salesman, very mean, a mighty smoker-"he reeks of it,"
she said, "always"-and interested in nothing but golf, billiards
(which he played very badly), pigeon shooting, convivial Free
Masonry and Stock Exchange punting. Mostly they drifted about the
Riviera. Her mother had contrived her marriage when she was
eighteen. They were the first samples I ever encountered of the
great multitude of functionless property owners which encumbers
modern civilisation-but at the time I didn't think much of that
aspect of them…
I tell all this business as it happened without comment, because I
have no comment to make. It was all strange to me, strange rather
than wonderful, and, it may be, some dream of beauty died for ever
in those furtive meetings; it happened to me, and I could scarcely
have been more irresponsible in the matter or controlled events less
if I had been suddenly pushed over a cliff into water. I swam, of
course-finding myself in it. Things tested me, and I reacted, as I
have told. The bloom of my innocence, if ever there had been such a
thing, was gone. And here is the remarkable thing about it; at the
time and for some days I was over-weeningly proud; I have never been
so proud before or since; I felt I had been promoted to virility; I
was unable to conceal my exultation from Willersley. It was a mood
of shining shameless ungracious self-approval. As he and I went
along in the cool morning sunshine by the rice fields in the throat
of the Val Maggia a silence fell between us.
"You know?" I said abruptly,-"about that woman?"
Willersley did not answer for a moment. He looked at me over the
corner of his spectacles.
"Things went pretty far?" he asked.
"Oh! all the way!" and I had a twinge of fatuous pride in my
unpremeditated achievement.
"She came to your room?"
I nodded.
"I heard her. I heard her whispering… The whispering and
rustling and so on. I was in my room yesterday… Any one
might have heard you."
I went on with my head in the air.
"You might have been caught, and that would have meant endless
trouble. You might have incurred all sorts of consequences. What
did you know about her?… We have wasted four days in that hot
close place. When we found that League of Social Service we were
talking about," he said with a determined eye upon me, "chastity
will be first among the virtues prescribed."
"I shall form a rival league," I said a little damped. "I'm hanged
if I give up a single desire in me until I know why."
He lifted his chin and stared before him through his glasses at
nothing. "There are some things," he said, "that a man who means to
work-to do great public services-MUST turn his back upon. I'm not
discussing the rights or wrongs of this sort of thing. It happens
to be the conditions we work under. It will probably always be so.
If you want to experiment in that way, if you want even to discuss
it,-out you go from political life. You must know that's so…
You're a strange man, Remington, with a kind of kink in you. You've
a sort of force. You might happen to do immense things…
Only-"
He stopped. He had said all that he had forced himself to say.
"I mean to take myself as Iam," I said. "I'm going to get
experience for humanity out of all my talents-and bury nothing."
Willersley twisted his face to its humorous expression. "I doubt if
sexual proclivities," he said drily, come within the scope of the
parable."
I let that go for a little while. Then I broke out. "Sex!" said I,
"is a fundamental thing in life. We went through all this at
Trinity. I'm going to look at it, experience it, think about it-
and get it square with the rest of life. Career and Politics must
take their chances of that. It's part of the general English
slackness that they won't look this in the face. Gods! what a
muffled time we're coming out of! Sex means breeding, and breeding
is a necessary function in a nation. The Romans broke up upon that.
The Americans fade out amidst their successes. Eugenics-"
"THAT wasn't Eugenics," said Willersley.
"It was a woman," I said after a little interval, feeling oddly that
I had failed altogether to answer him, and yet had a strong dumb
case against him.
BOOK THE SECOND
MARGARET
CHAPTER THE FIRST
MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE
1
I must go back a little way with my story. In the previous book I