underbred, and underfed propertyless man is a man who has lost the
possibility of liberty. There's no liberty worth a rap for him. A
man who is swimming hopelessly for life wants nothing but the
liberty to get out of the water; he'll give every other liberty for
it-until he gets out."
Sir Graham took me up and we fell into a discussion of the changing
qualities of Liberalism. It was a good give-and-take talk,
extraordinarily refreshing after the nonsense and crowding secondary
issues of the electioneering outside. We all contributed more or
less except Miss Gamer; Margaret followed with knitted brows and
occasional interjections. "People won't SEE that," for example, and
"It all seems so plain to me." The doctor showed himself clever but
unsubstantial and inconsistent. Isabel sat back with her black mop
of hair buried deep in the chair looking quickly from face to face.
Her colour came and went with her vivid intellectual excitement;
occasionally she would dart a word, usually a very apt word, like a
lizard's tongue into the discussion. I remember chiefly that a
chance illustration betrayed that she had read Bishop Burnet…
After that it was not surprising that Isabel should ask for a lift
in our car as far as the Lurky Committee Room, and that she should
offer me quite sound advice EN ROUTE upon the intellectual
temperament of the Lurky gasworkers.
On the third occasion that I saw Isabel she was, as I have said,
climbing a tree-and a very creditable tree-for her own private
satisfaction. It was a lapse from the high seriousness of politics,
and I perceived she felt that I might regard it as such and attach
too much importance to it. I had some difficulty in reassuring her.
And it's odd to note now-it has never occurred to me before-that
from that day to this I do not think I have ever reminded Isabel of
that encounter.
And after that memory she seems to be flickering about always in the
election, an inextinguishable flame; now she flew by on her bicycle,
now she dashed into committee rooms, now she appeared on doorsteps
in animated conversation with dubious voters; I took every chance I
could to talk to her-I had never met anything like her before in
the world, and she interested me immensely-and before the polling
day she and I had become, in the frankest simplicity, fast
friends…
That, I think, sets out very fairly the facts of our early
relationship. But it is hard to get it true, either in form or
texture, because of the bright, translucent, coloured, and
refracting memories that come between. One forgets not only the
tint and quality of thoughts and impressions through that
intervening haze, one forgets them altogether. I don't remember now
that I ever thought in those days of passionate love or the
possibility of such love between us. I may have done so again and
again. But I doubt it very strongly. I don't think I ever thought
of such aspects. I had no more sense of any danger between us,
seeing the years and things that separated us, than I could have had
if she had been an intelligent bright-eyed bird. Isabel came into
my life as a new sort of thing; she didn't join on at all to my
previous experiences of womanhood. They were not, as I have
laboured to explain, either very wide or very penetrating
experiences, on the whole, "strangled dinginess" expresses them, but
I do not believe they were narrower or shallower than those of many
other men of my class. I thought of women as pretty things and
beautiful things, pretty rather than beautiful, attractive and at
times disconcertingly attractive, often bright and witty, but,
because of the vast reservations that hid them from me, wanting,
subtly and inevitably wanting, in understanding. My idealisation of
Margaret had evaporated insensibly after our marriage. The shrine I
had made for her in my private thoughts stood at last undisguisedly
empty. But Isabel did not for a moment admit of either idealisation
or interested contempt. She opened a new sphere of womanhood to me.
With her steady amber-brown eyes, her unaffected interest in
impersonal things, her upstanding waistless blue body, her energy,
decision and courage, she seemed rather some new and infinitely
finer form of boyhood than a feminine creature, as I had come to
measure femininity. She was my perfect friend. Could I have
foreseen, had my world been more wisely planned, to this day we
might have been such friends.
She seemed at that time unconscious of sex, though she has told me
since how full she was of protesting curiosities and restrained
emotions. She spoke, as indeed she has always spoken, simply,
clearly, and vividly; schoolgirl slang mingled with words that
marked ample voracious reading, and she moved quickly with the free
directness of some graceful young animal. She took many of the easy
freedoms a man or a sister might have done with me. She would touch
my arm, lay a hand on my shoulder as I sat, adjust the lapel of a
breast-pocket as she talked to me. She says now she loved me always
from the beginning. I doubt if there was a suspicion of that in her