h I was living. I went about the
world; I met a great number of varied personalities; I read endless
books in trains as I went to and fro. I developed social relationships
at my uncle's house that Marion did not share. The seeds of new ideas
poured in upon me and grew in me. Those early and middle years of one's
third decade are, I suppose, for a man the years of greatest mental
growth. They are restless years and full of vague enterprise.

Each time I returned to Ealing, life there seemed more alien, narrow,
and unattractive--and Marion less beautiful and more limited and
difficult--until at last she was robbed of every particle of her magic.
She gave me always a cooler welcome, I think, until she seemed entirely
apathetic. I never asked myself then what heartaches she might hide or
what her discontents might be.

I would come home hoping nothing, expecting nothing.

This was my fated life, and I had chosen it. I became more sensitive to
the defects I had once disregarded altogether; I began to associate her
sallow complexion with her temperamental insufficiency, and the heavier
lines of her mouth and nostril with her moods of discontent. We
drifted apart; wider and wider the gap opened. I tired of baby-talk and
stereotyped little fondlings; I tired of the latest intelligence from
those wonderful workrooms, and showed it all too plainly; we hardly
spoke when we were alone together. The mere unreciprocated physical
residue of my passion remained--an exasperation between us.

No children came to save us. Marion had acquired at Smithie's a disgust
and dread of maternity. All that was the fruition and quintessence of
the "horrid" elements in life, a disgusting thing, a last indignity that
overtook unwary women. I doubt indeed a little if children would have
saved us; we should have differed so fatally about their upbringing.

Altogether, I remember my life with Marion as a long distress, now hard,
now tender. It was in those days that I first became critical of my life
and burdened with a sense of error and maladjustment. I would lie
awake in the night, asking myself the purpose of things, reviewing my
unsatisfying, ungainly home-life, my days spent in rascal enterprise
and rubbish-selling, contrasting all I was being and doing with my
adolescent ambitions, my Wimblehurst dreams. My circumstances had an
air of finality, and I asked myself in vain why I had forced myself into
them.

VI

The end of our intolerable si