The New Machiavelli

dea of the factors and early influences by which my particular scrap of subjective tapestry was shaped, to show the child playing on the nursery floor, the son perplexed by his mother, gazing aghast at his dead father, exploring interminable suburbs, touched by first intimations of the sexual mystery, coming in with a sort of confused avidity towards the centres of the life of London. It is only by such an effort to write it down that one realises how marvellously crowded, how marvellously analytical and synthetic t

, so closely has mood succeeded and overlaid and obliterated mood, the phases by which an utter horror of death was replaced by the growing realisation of its necessity and dignity. Difficulty of the imagination with infinite space, infinite time, entangled my mind; and moral distre

quillity, of absolute confidence in whatever that Incomprehensible Comprehensive which must needs be the substratum of all things, may be. Feeling OF IT, feeling BY IT, I cannot feel afraid of it. I think I had got quite clearly and finally to that adjustment long before my Cambridge days w

rception that it would be a large and difficult thing in my life, but my early training was all in the direction of regarding it as an irrelevant thing, as something disconnected

uty. Even as a boy I knew the thing as a haunting and alluring mystery that I tried to keep away from. Its dim

eauty of the body that ever came into my life. As I write of it I feel again the shameful attraction of those gracious forms. I used to look at th

urred and dishonoured by shame, by enigmatical warnings, by cultivated aversions, an ignorance in which a fascinated curiosity and desire struggled like a thing in a net. I knew so little and I felt so much. There was indeed no Aphrodite at all in my youthful Pantheon, but instead there was a mysterious and

from the rest of my life, a

May-day poster displaying a splendid proletarian in red and black on a barricade against a flaring orange sky, dominated his decorations. Hatherleigh affected a fine untidiness, and all the place, even the floor, was littered with books, for the most part open and face downward; deeper darknesses were supplied by a discarded gown and our caps, all conscientiously battered, Hatherleigh's flopped like an elephant's ear and inserted quill pens supported the corners of mine; the highlights of the picture came chiefly as reflections from his chequered blue mugs full of audit ale. We sat on oak chairs, except the four or five who crowded on a capacious settle, we drank a lot of beer and were often fuddled, and occasionally quite drunk, and we all smoked reckless-looking pipes,--t

broke out into a monologue on decency. "Modesty and Decency," said Hatherleigh, "are Oriental vices. The Jews brought them to Europe. They'

c race with the less elegant war customs of the Soudan and the northwest frontier of India, and quoted Doughty, at that time a little-known author, and Cunninghame Graham to show that the Arab was worse than a county-town spinster in his regard for re

from our hands like an intellectual frog, "

e or think--even think! until it leads to our coming to--to the business at last with nothing but a few prohibitions, a few hints, a lot of dirty jokes and, and "--he waved a hand and seemed to seek and catch his image in the air--"oh, a confounded buttered slide of sentiment, to guide us. I tell you I'm going to think about it and talk about it until I see a little more dayligh

contributed to this discussion that followed. I am, however, pretty certain that it was then that ideal that we were pleased to call aristocracy and which soon became the common property of our set was developed.

roken in to run between fences, and he admits it. WE'VE got to be able to think of anything. And 'such things aren't f

coloured man i

s? If some things aren't to be thought about ever! We've got the privilege of all these extra years for getti

ow down every barrier of prohibition and take them in and see what came of it. We became for a time even intemperately experimental, and one of u

. I recall prolonged discussion of polygamy on the way to Royston, muddy November tramps to Madingley, when amidst much profanity from Hatherleigh at the serious treatment of so obsolete a matter, we weighed the reasons, if any, for the institution of marriage. The fine dim night-time spaces of the Great Court

under a bridge. It was a late Easter and a blazing one, and we boated and bathed and talked of being Hellenic and the beauty of the bo

would come tramping back through the still keen moonlight singing and shouting. We formed romantic friendships with one another, and grieved more or less convincingly that there were no splendid women fit to be our

in spite of our liberal intentions when Benton committed himself to that. And after such talk we would fall upon great pauses of emotional dreaming, and if by chance we passed a girl in a governess cart, or some farmer's daughter walki

hrase that we flourished about in the union and made our watchword, namely, "stark fact." We hung nude pictures in our rooms much as if they had been flags, to the earnest concern of our bedder

ar or another. There was Benton who had a Research Fellowship and went to Tubingen, there was Esmeer and myself who both became Residential Fellows. I had taken the Mental

rather abnormal blue with an appetite for ideas, took games seriously enough to train, and on the other hand we intimated contempt for the rather mediocre, deliberately humorous, consciously gentlemanly and consciously wild undergraduate men who made up the mass of Cambridge life. After the manne

ch Hatherleigh invented the nickname the "Pinky Dinkys," intending thereby both contempt and abhorrence in almost equal measure. The Pinky Dinky

n the Pinky Dinky; we sat about our one fire after a walk in the rain--it was our only wet day--smoked our excessively virile pipes, and elabor

a good deal of amusement

ig!" said

with a light gay touch. He makes the weird ones mad. But so

at the giggling swi

king the tea, 'We're all being frightfully fu

s: 'I'm afraid I shall never be a respon

t not vulgar,

y're Plebs and they know it. They haven't the Guts to get hold of things. And

s for a time, vi

Pinky Dinkys would like to keep outfitters' shops with whimsy 'scriptions on the boxes and

od people, and better than most Pinky Din

ome playful at th

id the Pinky Dinky, and

p to, anyhow?" roared old Hatherleigh sudde

to get at the core of the

inky goes to King's Chapel, and sits and feels in the

LDN'T t

r talks about it, never reads about i

ts, oh! ever so deep, the

ne pro

would call good form.... There's a lot of horrid coarseness got into the world somehow. SOMEBODY put it there.... And

all his fun and lev

n mind. Not like E

about sex, how could he b

poor dears in. Cambridge is soaked with it; it's some confounded local bacillus. Like the thing that gives a flavour to Havana cigars. He comes up here to be made i

ding his feet on the fender, "it's just a nervous sn

afraid of

ed Hatherleigh and

a way are we," he added, and mad

the Natural Science Tripos, "what i

checked by our ign

us?" asked Benton, voicing the t

am always astonished by the multitude of things that we took for granted. It seemed to us that Cambridge was in the order of things, for all the world like having eyeb

laying bare the purpose of the politi

he Education Office. I am firmly convinced it is hopeless to think of reforming the old public schools and universities to meet the needs of a modern state, they send their roots too deep and far, the cost would exceed any good that could possibly be effected, and so I have sought a way round this invincible obstacle. I do think it would be quite practicable to side-track, as the Americans say, the whole system by creating hardworking, hard-li

ectually active, proud type of man. Everything else would have been made subservient to that. I should have kept my grip on the men through their vacation, and somehow or other I would have contrived a young woman to match them. I think I could have seen to it effectually enough that they didn't get at croquet and tennis with the vicarage daughters and discover sex in the Peeping Tom fashion I di

time since I came down, and so far as the Empire

where paper moulders and leaves the wall, a feeling of ineradicable contagion in the Gothic buildings, in the narrow ditch-like rivers, in tho

Parent, but it has no fear of God; it offers amidst surroundings that vary between disguises and antiquarian charm the inflammation of literature's purple draught; one hears there a peculiar thin scandal like no other scandal in the world--a covetous scan

One might as soon try to fake the old VICTORY at Portsmouth into a line of battleship again. Besides which the old Academic mind, li

lmen, his kindred, could one get from him a School for Princes. Yet apart from his teaching he was as curious and adorable as a good Netsuke. Until q

y naive undergraduate eye. Or I see him lecturing. He lectured walking up and down between the desks, talking in a fluting rapid voice, and with the utmost lucidity. If he could not walk up and down he could not lecture. His mind and voice had precisely the fluid quality of some clear subtle liquid; one felt it could f

ravel had been to lecture here and lecture there. His student phase had culminated in papers of quite exceptional brilliance, and he had gone on to lecture with a cheerful combination of wit and mannerism that had made him a success from the beginning. He has lectured ever since. He lectures still. Year by year he has be

oasts as he made of it were tinged with playfulness. Certainly he had a scholar's knowledge of the works of Miss Marie Corelli, Miss Braddon, Miss Elizabeth Glyn and Madame Sarah Grand that would have astonished and flattered those ladies enormously, and he loved nothing so much in his hours of relaxation as to propound and answer difficult questions upon their b

he Gyp-Bedder class; about her he related quietly absurd anecdotes. He displayed a marvellous invention in ascribing to her plausible expres

hat queer big active childish brain that had never lusted nor hated nor grieved nor feared nor passionately loved,--a web of iridescent threads. He had luminous final theories about Love and Death and Immortality, odd matters they seemed for hi

ulses, utilising my esthetic tendencies, my dominating idea, the statesman's idea, that idea of social service which is the protagonist of my story, that real though complex passion for Making, making

ained the idea which sustained my mother, and which sustains so many people in the world,--the idea that the universe, whatever superficial discords it may present, is as a matter of fact "all right," is being steered to definite ends by a serene and unquestionable God. My mother thought that Order prevailed, and that disor

n; in place of my mother's attentive, meticulous but occasionally extremely irascible Providence, the talk was all

scoffed at that pompous question-begging word "Evolution," having, so to speak, found it out. Evolution, some illuminating talker had remarked at the Britten lunch table, had led not only to man, but to the liver-fluke and skunk, obviously it might lead anywhere; order came into thi

teen months and some will hardly speak until three, and the thing has very little to do with their subsequent mental quality. So it is with young people; some will begin their religious, their social, their sexual interests at fourteen, some not until far on in the

e time. I had travelled scarcely at all, I had never crossed the Channel, but I had read copiously and I had formed a very good working idea of this round globe with its mountains and wildernesses and forests and all th

at nineteen. So far as extension went it was, I fancy, very like the world I know now at forty-two; I had practically all the mountains and seas, boundaries and races, products and possibilities that

sive nuisance to be earnestly ignored by all right-minded men. We had no conception of the quality of politics, nor how "interests" came into such affairs; we believed men were swayed by purely intellectual convictions and were either right or wrong, honest or dishonest (in which case they deserved to be shot), good or bad. We knew nothing of mental inertia, and could imagine the opinion of a whole nation changed by one lucid and convincing exposition. We were capable of the most incongruous transfers from the scroll of history to our own times, we could suppose Brixton ravaged and Hampstead burnt in civil wars for the succession to the throne, or Cheapside a lane of death and the front of the Mansion House set about with guillotines in the course of an accurately transposed French Revolution. We rebuilt London by Act of Parliament, and once in a m

tween phases of quite adult understanding and phases of tawdrily magnificent puerility. Sometimes I myself was in those tumbrils that went along Cheapside to the Mansion House, a Sydney Cartonesque figure, a white defeated Mirabean; sometimes it

wo hours' journey away from London gave that place for the first time an effect of unity in my imaginati

At City Merchants' we had had no sense of effective contact; we boasted, it is true, an under secretary and a colonial governor among our old boys, but they were never real to us; such distinguished sons as returned to visit the old school were allusive and pleasant in the best Pinky Dinky style, and pretended to be in earnest about nothing but our football and cricket, to mourn the abolition of "water," and find a shuddering personal interes

distinguished mass on the more athletic side of Pinky Dinkyism, and their hostility to ideas and to the expression of ideas ceased to limit and trouble me. The brighter men of each generation stay up; these others go down to propagate

he ceiling of our guest chamber at Trinity was glorious with the arms of Sir William Harcourt, whose Death Duties had seemed at first like a socialist dawn. Mr. Evesham we asked to come to the union every year, Masters, Chamberlain and the old Duke of Devonshire; they did not come indeed, but their polite refusals brought us all, as it were, within personal touch of them. One heard of cabinet councils an

of political caricature, while I was getting them reduced in my imagination to the stature of humanity, and their motives to the quality of impulses like my own, I wa

was the leading exponent of the new doctrines in Trinity, and the figure upon his wall of a huge-muscled, black-haired toiler swaggering sledgehammer in hand across a revolutionary barricade, seemed the quintessence of what he had to expound. Landlord and capitalist had robbed and enslaved the workers, and were driving them q

red ties we wore. Our simple verdict on existing arrangements was that they were "all wrong." The rich were robbers and knew it, kings and princes were usurpers and knew it, religious teachers were impostors in league with power, the economic system was an elab

also I had met with Fabian publications, but if I did I forget the circumstances. And no doubt my innate constructiveness with its practical

not under any stimulus whatever be expected to change, into the former. It crept into my mind as slowly and surely as the dawn creeps into a room tha

inly that there was not a thing beyond the primary needs that my stimulated imagination might demand that it would not be an effort for me to secure. A certain aggressive radicalism against the ruling and propertied classes followed almost naturally from my circumstances. It did not at first connect itself at all with the perception of a planless disorder in human affairs that had been forced upon me by the atmosphere of my upbringing, nor did it link me in sympathy with any of the profounder realities of poverty. It was a personal independent thing. The dingier people one saw in the back streets and lower quarters of Bromstead and Penge, the drift of dirty chi

, behaved, and exactly as we were expected to behave. On the whole it is a population of poor quality round about Cambridge, rather stunted and spiritless and very difficult to idealise. That theoretical Working Man of ours!--if we felt the clash at all we explained it, I suppose, by assuming that he came from another part of the country; Esmeer, I remember, who

coundrelly and scandalous system of private ownership to fragments, began to give place to a limitless spectacle of inefficiency, to a conception of millions of people not organised as they should be, not educated as they should be, not simply prevented from but incapable of nearly every sort of beauty, mostly kindly and well meaning, mostly incompetent, mostly obstinate, and easily humbugged and easily diverted. Even the tragic and inspiring idea of Marx, that the poor were nearing a limit

bridge. But I did have intimations. Most acutely do I remember the doubts that followed the visit of Chris Robin

e attempt to screw up Hatherleigh made by some inexpert duffers who used nails instead of screws and gimlets, there was no attempt to rag. Next day Chris Robinson went and spoke at Bennett Hall

his chair, and clung to a teacup and saucer and looked away from us into the fire, and we all sat about on tables and chair-arms and windowsills and boxes and anywhere except upon chairs after the manner of young men. The only other chair whose seat was occupied was the one containing

these Chaps," he repeated with a n

reassuri

stirred his tea earnestly th

hire, what with the new machines and all that," he specu

ad that perhaps he would

became a different man. He declared he would explain to us just exactly what socialism was, and went on at once to an impas

hat he had been shy and seemed not a little incompetent, his provincial accent became a beauty of his earnest speech, we were carried away by his indignations. We looked with shining eyes at one another and at the various dons who had dropped in a

his left boot very high, and he pointed his remarks with a long thin hand and occasionally adjusted the unstable glasses that hid his watery eyes. "I don't want to carp," he began. "The present system, I admit, sta

f it answered everything, and Hatherle

ress of yours"--Chris Robinson on the hearthrug made acquiescent and inviting noises--"but the real question remains how exactly are you going to end all these wrongs? There are the administrative questions. If you ab

" said Chri

I can quite easily imagine a socialist state administered in a sort o

ngs are now," said Chris Robinso

raft, for example, could easily be

rm

Chris Robinson did not shine in conflict with Denson; he was an orator and not a dialectician, and he missed Denson's points and displayed a disposition to p

d and his whole being rhetorical, and measured him against the huge

nursed his knee with hairy wristed hands that protruded from his flannel shirt, and drank lemo

e our big meetings

hat discussion. "It's all very easy for your learned men to sit and pick holes," he said

in a factory when he was twelve--"when you Chaps were all with your mammies "--a

or education. Why! I longed all through one winter to read a bit of Darwin. I mu

ic noise and drank beer at him

hris Robinson. "And one learns to go straight at a thing w

That was the gist

urning to his rankling memory of De

opposition, "the alternative is to risk a wo

Robinson. "We don't propose anyt

s quite exceptional in its socialistic professions. And we were all, you must understand,

little figure with its heavy chin and its general effect of vehement gesticulation, its wild shouts of boyish enthusiasm for effective force, its lyric delight in the sounds and colours, in the very odours of empire, its wonderful discovery of machinery and cotton waste and the under officer and the engineer, and "sho

he give m

s, that the current socialist movement still fails, I think, to express. The sort of thing that follows, for example, tore something out of my inmost nature and gave it a shape, and I took i

he road and bridge the ford, Make ye sure to each his own That he reap where

criticism, this sticks in my mind, sti

blindness bows dow

o orders unless

-arms awful: 'e l

he regiment an' pok

irtiness, all

in' things rath

abby-nay, kul

our rifle an' y

onestly entertain the now remarkable delusion that England had her side-arms at that time kept anything but "awful." He learnt better, and we all learnt with him in the dark years o

first crackling of rifles, remained the pleasant, rather incompetent men they had always been, failing to imagine, failing to plan and co-operate, failing to grip. And the common soldiers, too, they were just what our streets and country-side had made them, no sudden magic came out of the war bugles for them. Neither splendid nor disgraceful were they,--just ill-trained and fairly plucky and wonderfully good-tempered men--paying for it. And how it lowered our vitality all that first winter to hear of Nicholson's Nek, and then

ad looked at it through a window instead of through the pages of the illustrated papers; I recall as if I had been there the wide open spaces, the ragged hillsides, the open order attacks of helmeted men in khaki, the scarce visible smoke of the guns, the wrecked trains in great lonely places, the burnt isolated f

streets, of the flicker of papers hastily bought and torn open in the twilight, of the doubtful reception of d

corrective of Kipling. It was the first detached and adverse criticism of the Englishman I had ever encountered. It must have been published already nine or ten years when I read it. The country had paid no heed to it, had gone on to the expensive lessons of the War because of the dull aversion

slouched, aggressive and preparing to bring our Imperial pride to a reckoning, was extremely novel and distasteful to me. It set me worrying of nights. It put all my projects for social and political reconstruction upon a new uncomfortable footing. It made them no longer merely desirable but urgent.

th produced in me was an attempt to belittle hi

a mind full of bitter enlightenment, I can do Meredith justice, and admit the conflict was not only essential but cardinal in his picture, that the terrible inflexibility of the rich aunts and the still more terrible claim of Mrs. Burman Radnor, the "infernal punctilio," and Dudley Sowerby's limitations, were the central substance of that inale

opments that found me a crude schoolboy and left me a man, there comes out, as if it stood for all the rest, my first holiday a

which the cumulative vote and the support of the "advanced" people had placed him. He had, like myself, a small independent income that relieved him of any necessity to earn a living, and he had a kindred craving for social

crossed over by the Antrona pass (on which we were benighted) into Italy, and by way of Domo D'ossola and the Santa Maria Maggiore valley to Cann

swaying of the moored boat beneath our feet. Then, very obvious and simple, the little emotion of standing out from the homeland and seeing the long white Kentish cliffs recede. One walked about the boat doing one's best not to feel absurdly adventurous, and presently a movement of people directed

found the French of City Merchants' and Cambridge a shy and viscous flow, and then one was standing in the train as it went slowly through the rail-laid street to Boulogne Ville, and one looked out at the world in French, porters in blouses, workmen in enor

e said, and was betrayed i

ng and surly, wrapped up in one's couverture and with one's oreiller all awry, to encounter a new social phenomenon, the German official, so di

, but it still revives a certain lingering youthf

e all sorts of generalisations from the steeply sloping fields on the hillsides, and fro

London, the mean dirtiness of Cambridgeshire. It came to me that perhaps my scheme of international values was all wrong, that quite stupendous p

ike the contrast of him with the drilled Swiss and Germans about us. Convict coloured stockings and vast hobnail boots finished him below, and all his luggage was a borrowed rucksac that he

boiled eggs in a vast clear space of rime-edged rocks, snow-mottled, above a blue-gashed glacier. All about us the monstrous rock surfaces rose

ling of having come out of

with a sense of never having perceive

f the mountain above the Gemmi, and the early summer dawn breaking over Italy as we moved from our night's crouching and munched bread and chocolate and stretched o

had an inaccurate abundant habit of topographical reference; he made me see and trace and see again the Roman E

the same question, very near and altogether predominant to us, the question: "What am I going to do with my life?" He saw it

I said, "and everything that calls on

d without any mo

at we are up to. We've got to do that now. And then--it's one

s was a playful habit with him, that and a slight deliberate humour,

ade your

eculiar forward mo

uld you

e there is one thing we MUST have and increase, and that is the number of people w

re it's wo

y. I don't discus

feel, are building the great modern state, joining wall to wall and way to way, the new great Engl

h many doubts. "Y

morning like an old coat. His devotion is mingled with a considerable whimsicality, and they say he is easily flattered by subordinates and easily offended into opposition by colleagues; he has made mistakes at times and followed wrong courses, still there he is, a flat contradiction to all the ordinary doctrine of motives, a man who has foregone any chances of wealth and profit, foregone any easier paths to distinction, foregone marriage and parentage, in order to serve the community. He does it without any fee or reward except his personal self-satisfaction i

thinks somewhere, somewhen, he will get credit. Only last year I heard some men talking of him, and they were noting, with little mean smiles, how he had shown himself self-conscious while there was talk of some honorary degree-g

dustrious elderliness flourish for the good of the world! He lectured a little in conversation then; he lectures more now and listens less, toilsome

rman and Italian, with disputes about the way to take, and other things that I will tell of in another section. But the white passion of human service was our dominant theme. Not simply perhaps nor altogether unselfishly, but quite honestly, and with at least a frequent self-forgetfulness, did we want to do fine and noble things, to help in their developing, to lessen misery, to broaden

rness and order, light and foresight, these things I know for Good. It was muddle had just given us all the still freshly painful disasters and humiliations of the war, muddle that gives us the visibly s

dirtiness, all

in' things rath

d over again. "That is what we are fo

t and half Utopianising,

f the intricate difficulties, the monstrous passive resistances, the hostilities to such a development as we conceived our work subserved,

tive movement coming from the heart-searchings the Boer war had occasioned. We would sink to gossip--even at the Suetonius level. Willersley would decline towards illuminating anecdotes that I capped more or less loosely from my private reading. We wer

an active man on the School Board. Our feet were already on the lower rungs that led up and up. He was six and twenty, and I twenty-two. We intimated our individual careers in terms of bold expectation. I had prophetic glimpses of walls and hoardings clamorous with "Vote for Remington," and Willersley no doubt saw himself chairman of this committee and that, saying a few slightly ironical words after the declaration of the poll, and t

e passes! How many of them, like mine, have come al

e times when one surveyed the whole world of men as if it was a little thing at one's feet, and by way of contrast I remember once lying in bed--it must have been duri

g style pr

ct of life. So much seemed possible, and everything we could think of so improbable. There were lapses when it seemed to me I could never be anyt

failures, and why they had failed--but young men

ave shocked him. Socialism as a simple democratic cry we had done with for ever. We were socialists because Individualism for us meant muddle, meant a crowd of separated, undisciplined little people all obstinately a

peace and war alike. The man who owns property is a public official and

A man's none the less an official because he's irresponsible. What he does with his pr

an ideal state, an organised state as confident and powerful as modern science, as balanced and beautiful as a body, as benefice

and renewed we had in mind, and how to serve that end, to subdue undisciplined worker and undisciplined

nal reorganisation, and weighing considerations as lightly as though the world was wax in our hands. "Great England," we said in effect, over and over again, "and we will be among the makers! England renew

stair above the town of Locarno. Down below the houses clustered amidst a confusion of heat-bitten greenery. I had been sitting silently on the para

bstance remains as clear as ever. I said how we were in our measure emperors and kings, men undriven, free to do as we pleased with life; we classed among the happy ones, our bread and common n

, you see," began Willersley, i

h all these years before us.... We're exception

seeking nothing but mean little vanities and indulgencies--and then take credit for modesty? I KNOW I am capable. I KNOW I have imagination. Modesty! I know if I don't attempt the very biggest t

na, the vast mountain distances, now tinged with sunset light, behind this nearer landscape, and the southward waters with remote coast towns shining dimly, waters that merged at last in a luminous golden ha

, and once as I was steaming past the brown low hills of Staten Island towards the towering vigour and clamorous vitality of New York City, that mood rose to its quintessence. And once it came to me, as I shall tell, on Dover cliffs. And a hundred times when I have thought of England as our country might be, wit

, passing swiftly at a turn from one to another, and refusing ever to mingle peacefully one with the other. I was asking myself openly and distinctly: what are you going to do for the world? What are you going to do with yourself? and wit

can remember still how through all those ripening years, the thought of women's beauty, their magic presence in the world beside me and the unknown, untried reactions of their intercourse, grew upon me and grew, as a strange presence grows in a room when one is occupied by other things. I bu

nd quickened all those disregarded dreams. I saw the sheathed beauty of women's forms all about me, in the cheerful waitresses at the inns, in the pedestrians one encounter

ather and daughter, who were walking down from Saas. She came swinging an

Willersley, re

id the old m

the girl, who passed wi

n a room, it has kept there bright and fresh

should detect the keen interest I took in them, and then as we came over the pass from Santa Maria Magg

ies five miles away--and as we came down we passed a group of five or six of them resting by the wayside. Their burthens were besi

ting, and two of th

pas

down that winding road, talking of politics and parties and bills of parliament and all sorts of dessicated things. That ro

not so sure," he said in a voice of intense discrimination

o a vigorous cursing of all I held dear. "Fettered

nd w

d you and everything go hang? Deep breasts and rounded limbs--and we p

me with a deliberately quaint expression over his glasses,

l in my blood when

nd partly because of that and partly because there was a bag at the station that gave us the refreshment of clean linen and p

ty-three or thirty-four, slenderly built, with a warm reddish skin and very abundant fair golden hair, the wife of a petulant-looking heavy-faced man of perhaps fifty-three, who smoked a

ed to our talk,

phical talk, and she had envied our pedestrian travel. "My husband does

eed it is easy to be daring with people one has never seen before and may never see again. I said I loved beautiful scenery and all beautiful things, and the pointing note in my voice made her laugh. She told me I had bold eyes,

oore at the time, but I

the garden. My head was full of her, and I found it necessary to talk about her. So I made her a problem in sociology. "Who the deuce are these people?" I sai

yed. The next day at lunch she and I met like old friends. A huge mass of private thinking during the

ked rather quickly, "aft

d, and hung for a

y heart was beating like a steamer pro

rom your room?" she

ber seventeen, near the stair

ook. I forget altogether what that book was called, though I remember to this day with the utmo

hat afternoon, but I refused. He made some other proposals

write d

e looked at me curiously. "Very well," he said; "then I'll make som

the other people. Finally I went up to my room and sat down by the windows, staring out. There came a li

ok," she said, a

pered, trembling

boy," she sai

door nearly opened. "Come in," I said almost impatiently, for anyone mi

ed with a faint smile on her l

nd without a word drew her to me and kissed her. And I remember that as I kissed her she made a little noise alm

e discontented wife who had tapped a momen

ings off admirably, and it seemed to me that Willersley was the dullest old dog in the world. I wanted to give him advice. I wanted to give him derisive pokes. After dinner and coffee in the lounge I was too excited and hilarious to go to bed, I made him come with

we do to-mor

ow in the morning and spend to-morr

ch behind the town

that's the best time for it

singing and dancing on a creaking, protesting little stage. I eyed their generous display of pink neck and arm with the s

ten. (Her christian name was Milly.) She was tired and rather low-spirited, and disposed to be sentimental, and for the first time in our intercourse I found myself liking her for the sake of her own personality. There was something kindly and generous appearing behind the veil of naive and uncontrolled sensuality she had worn. The

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 w

ts 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;

id abruptly,--"a

a moment. He looked at me over

t pretty fa

a twinge of fatuous pride in

e to you

odd

ispering and rustling and so on. I was in my ro

ith my head

What did you know about her?... We have wasted four days in that hot close place. When we found that League of Social Ser

little damped. "I'm hanged if I give up

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 discus

aid all that he had

"I'm going to get experience for humanity

ession. "I doubt if sexual proclivities," he sai

--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

Eugenics," sa

feeling oddly that I had failed altogether to answ