sudden lateral gesture of the arm to emphasise the high note with
which she dismissed the efficiency of the Charity Organisation
Society. We shipped about an inch of water and sat in it for the
rest of the time, an inconvenience she disregarded heroically. We
had difficulties in landing Oscar from his frail craft upon the ait
of our feasting,-he didn't balance sideways and was much alarmed,
and afterwards, as Margaret had a pain in her back, I took him in my
canoe, let him hide his shame with an ineffectual but not positively
harmful paddle, and towed the other by means of the joined painters.
Still it was the fault of the inadequate information supplied in the
books and not of Altiora that that was not the date of my betrothal.
I find it not a little difficult to state what kept me back from
proposing marriage to Margaret that summer, and what urged me
forward at last to marry her. It is so much easier to remember
one's resolutions than to remember the moods and suggestions that
produced them.
Marrying and getting married was, I think, a pretty simple affair to
Altiora; it was something that happened to the adolescent and
unmarried when you threw them together under the circumstances of
health, warmth and leisure. It happened with the kindly and
approving smiles of the more experienced elders who had organised
these proximities. The young people married, settled down, children
ensued, and father and mother turned their minds, now decently and
properly disillusioned, to other things. That to Altiora was the
normal sexual life, and she believed it to be the quality of the
great bulk of the life about her.
One of the great barriers to human understanding is the wide
temperamental difference one finds in the values of things relating
to sex. It is the issue upon which people most need training in
charity and imaginative sympathy. Here are no universal standards
at all, and indeed for no single man nor woman does there seem to be
any fixed standard, so much do the accidents of circumstances and
one's physical phases affect one's interpretations. There is
nothing in the whole range of sexual fact that may not seem
supremely beautiful or humanly jolly or magnificently wicked or
disgusting or trivial or utterly insignificant, according to the eye
that sees or the mood that colours. Here is something that may fill
the skies and every waking hour or be almost completely banished
from a life. It may be everything on Monday and less than nothing
on Saturday. And we make our laws and rules as though in these
matters all men and women were commensurable one with another, with
an equal steadfast passion and an equal constant duty…
I don't know what dreams Altiora may have had in her schoolroom
days, I always suspected her of suppressed and forgotten phases, but
certainly her general effect now was of an entirely passionless
worldliness in these matters. Indeed so far as I could get at her,
she regarded sexual passion as being hardly more legitimate in a
civilised person than-let us say-homicidal mania. She must have
forgotten-and Bailey too. I suspect she forgot before she married
him. I don't suppose either of them had the slightest intimation of
the dimensions sexual love can take in the thoughts of the great
majority of people with whom they come in contact. They loved in
their way-an intellectual way it was and a fond way-but it had no
relation to beauty and physical sensation-except that there seemed
a decree of exile against these things. They got their glow in high
moments of altruistic ambition-and in moments of vivid worldly
success. They sat at opposite ends of their dinner table with so
and so "captured," and so and so, flushed with a mutual approval.
They saw people in love forgetful and distraught about them, and
just put it down to forgetfulness and distraction. At any rate
Altiora manifestly viewed my situation and Margaret's with an
abnormal and entirely misleading simplicity. There was the girl,
rich, with an acceptable claim to be beautiful, shiningly virtuous,
quite capable of political interests, and there was I, talented,
ambitious and full of political and social passion, in need of just
the money, devotion and regularisation Margaret could provide. We
were both unmarried-white sheets of uninscribed paper. Was there
ever a simpler situation? What more could we possibly want?
She was even a little offended at the inconclusiveness that did not
settle things at Pangbourne. I seemed to her, I suspect, to reflect
upon her judgment and good intentions.
7
I didn't see things with Altiora's simplicity.
I admired Margaret very much, I was fully aware of all that she and
I might give each other; indeed so far as Altiora went we were quite
in agreement. But what seemed solid ground to Altiora and the
ultimate footing of her emasculated world, was to me just the
superficial covering of a gulf-oh! abysses of vague and dim, and
yet stupendously significant things.
I couldn't dismiss the interests and the passion of sex as Altiora
did. Work, I agreed, was important; career and success; but deep
unanalysable instincts told me this preoccupation was a thing quite
as important; dangerous, interfering, destructive indeed, but none
the less a dominating interest in life. I have told how flittingly
and uninvited it came like a moth from the outer twilight into my