and ramshackle conventions which makes up our social order as the
individual meets it, that we should have come together so accidentally
and so blindly. Because we were no more than samples of the common fate.
Love is not only the cardinal fact in the individual life, but the most
important concern of the community; after all, the way in which the
young people of this generation pair off determines the fate of the
nation; all the other affairs of the State are subsidiary to that.
And we leave it to flushed and blundering youth to stumble on its own
significance, with nothing to guide in but shocked looks and sentimental
twaddle and base whisperings and cant-smeared examples.

I have tried to indicate something of my own sexual development in the
preceding chapter. Nobody was ever frank and decent with me in this
relation; nobody, no book, ever came and said to me thus and thus is
the world made, and so and so is necessary. Everything came obscurely,
indefinitely, perplexingly; and all I knew of law or convention in the
matter had the form of threatenings and prohibitions. Except through the
furtive, shameful talk of my coevals at Goudhurst and Wimblehurst, I
was not even warned against quite horrible dangers. My ideas were made
partly of instinct, partly of a romantic imagination, partly woven out
of a medley of scraps of suggestion that came to me haphazard. I had
read widely and confusedly "Vathek," Shelley, Tom Paine, Plutarch,
Carlyle, Haeckel, William Morris, the Bible, the Freethinker, the
Clarion, "The Woman Who Did,"--I mention the ingredients that come first
to mind. All sorts of ideas were jumbled up in me and never a lucid
explanation. But it was evident to me that the world regarded Shelley,
for example, as a very heroic as well as beautiful person; and that
to defy convention and succumb magnificently to passion was the proper
thing to do to gain the respect and affection of all decent people.

And the make-up of Marion's mind in the matter was an equally irrational
affair. Her training had been one, not simply of silences, but
suppressions. An enormous force of suggestion had so shaped her that
the intense natural fastidiousness of girlhood had developed into
an absolute perversion of instinct. For all that is cardinal in this
essential business of life she had one inseparable epithet--"horrid."
Without any such training she would have been a shy lover, but now she
was an impossible one. For the rest she h