of our return we found other people's houses open to us and eager
for us. We went out of London for week-ends and dined out, and
began discussing our projects for reciprocating these hospitalities.
As a single man unattached, I had had a wide and miscellaneous
social range, but now I found myself falling into place in a set.
For a time I acquiesced in this. I went very little to my clubs,
the Climax and the National Liberal, and participated in no bachelor
dinners at all. For a time, too, I dropped out of the garrulous
literary and journalistic circles I had frequented. I put up for
the Reform, not so much for the use of the club as a sign of serious
and substantial political standing. I didn't go up to Cambridge, I
remember, for nearly a year, so occupied was I with my new
adjustments.
The people we found ourselves among at this time were people, to put
it roughly, of the Parliamentary candidate class, or people already
actually placed in the political world. They ranged between very
considerable wealth and such a hard, bare independence as old
Willersley and the sister who kept house for him possessed. There
were quite a number of young couples like ourselves, a little
younger and more artless, or a little older and more established.
Among the younger men I had a sort of distinction because of my
Cambridge reputation and my writing, and because, unlike them, I was
an adventurer and had won and married my way into their circles
instead of being naturally there. They couldn't quite reckon upon
what I should do; they felt I had reserves of experience and
incalculable traditions. Close to us were the Cramptons, Willie
Crampton, who has since been Postmaster-General, rich and very
important in Rockshire, and his younger brother Edward, who has
specialised in history and become one of those unimaginative men of
letters who are the glory of latter-day England. Then there was
Lewis, further towards Kensington, where his cousins the Solomons
and the Hartsteins lived, a brilliant representative of his race,
able, industrious and invariably uninspired, with a wife a little in
revolt against the racial tradition of feminine servitude and
inclined to the suffragette point of view, and Bunting Harblow, an
old blue, and with an erratic disposition well under the control of
the able little cousin he had married. I had known all these men,
but now (with Altiora floating angelically in benediction) they
opened their hearts to me and took me into their order. They were
all like myself, prospective Liberal candidates, with a feeling that
the period of wandering in the wilderness of opposition was drawing
near its close. They were all tremendously keen upon social and
political service, and all greatly under the sway of the ideal of a
simple, strenuous life, a life finding its satisfactions in
political achievements and distinctions. The young wives were as
keen about it as the young husbands, Margaret most of all, and I-
whatever elements in me didn't march with the attitudes and habits
of this set were very much in the background during that time.
We would give little dinners and have evening gatherings at which
everything was very simple and very good, with a slight but
perceptible austerity, and there was more good fruit and flowers and
less perhaps in the way of savouries, patties and entrees than was
customary. Sherry we banished, and Marsala and liqueurs, and there
was always good home-made lemonade available. No men waited, but
very expert parlourmaids. Our meat was usually Welsh mutton-I
don't know why, unless that mountains have ever been the last refuge
of the severer virtues. And we talked politics and books and ideas
and Bernard Shaw (who was a department by himself and supposed in
those days to be ethically sound at bottom), and mingled with the
intellectuals-I myself was, as it were, a promoted intellectual.
The Cramptons had a tendency to read good things aloud on their less
frequented receptions, but I have never been able to participate
submissively in this hyper-digestion of written matter, and
generally managed to provoke a disruptive debate. We were all very
earnest to make the most of ourselves and to be and do, and I wonder
still at times, with an unassuaged perplexity, how it is that in
that phase of utmost earnestness I have always seemed to myself to
be most remote from reality.
2
I look back now across the detaching intervention of sixteen crowded
years, critically and I fancy almost impartially, to those
beginnings of my married life. I try to recall something near to
their proper order the developing phases of relationship. Iam
struck most of all by the immense unpremeditated, generous-spirited
insincerities upon which Margaret and I were building.
It seems to me that here I have to tell perhaps the commonest
experience of all among married educated people, the deliberate,
shy, complex effort to fill the yawning gaps in temperament as they
appear, the sustained, failing attempt to bridge abysses, level
barriers, evade violent pressures. I have come these latter years
of my life to believe that it is possible for a man and woman to be