nnesburg
during the strike period of 1913, he was on his way to see her in London
and to settle their relationship upon a new and more definite footing.
It was her suggestion that they should meet.

About her he felt an enormous, inexorable, dissatisfaction. He could not
persuade himself that his treatment of her and that his relations to
her squared with any of his preconceptions of nobility, and yet at no
precise point could he detect where he had definitely taken an ignoble
step. Through Amanda he was coming to the full experience of life. Like
all of us he had been prepared, he had prepared himself, to take life
in a certain way, and life had taken him, as it takes all of us, in an
entirely different and unexpected way.... He had been ready for noble
deeds and villainies, for achievements and failures, and here as the
dominant fact of his personal life was a perplexing riddle. He could
not hate and condemn her for ten minutes at a time without a flow of
exoneration; he could not think of her tolerantly or lovingly without
immediate shame and resentment, and with the utmost will in the world he
could not banish her from his mind.

During the intervening years he had never ceased to have her in his
mind; he would not think of her it is true if he could help it, but
often he could not help it, and as a negative presence, as a thing
denied, she was almost more potent than she had been as a thing
accepted. Meanwhile he worked. His nervous irritability increased, but
it did not hinder the steady development of his Research.

Long before his final parting from Amanda he had worked out his idea and
method for all the more personal problems in life; the problems he put
together under his headings of the first three "Limitations." He
had resolved to emancipate himself from fear, indulgence, and that
instinctive preoccupation with the interests and dignity of self which
he chose to term Jealousy, and with the one tremendous exception of
Amanda he had to a large extent succeeded. Amanda. Amanda. Amanda.
He stuck the more grimly to his Research to drown that beating in his
brain.

Emancipation from all these personal things he held now to be a mere
prelude to the real work of a man's life, which was to serve this dream
of a larger human purpose. The bulk of his work was to discover and
define that purpose, that purpose which must be the directing and
comprehending form of all the activities of the noble life. One cannot
be