instinct against informing prevented that. No
doubt I entertained ideas of vindictive pursuit and murderous reprisals.
And I was acutely enraged whenever I thought of my knife. The thing
indeed rankled in my mind for weeks and weeks, and altered all the
flavour of my world for me. It was the first time I glimpsed the simple
brute violence that lurks and peeps beneath our civilisation. A certain
kindly complacency of attitude towards the palpably lower classes was
qualified for ever.

4

But the other experience was still more cardinal. It was the first clear
intimation of a new motif in life, the sex motif, that was to rise and
increase and accumulate power and enrichment and interweave with and at
last dominate all my life.

It was when I was nearly fifteen this happened. It is inseparably
connected in my mind with the dusk of warm September evenings. I never
met the girl I loved by daylight, and I have forgotten her name. It was
some insignificant name.

Yet the peculiar quality of the adventure keeps it shining darkly like
some deep coloured gem in the common setting of my memories. It came as
something new and strange, something that did not join on to anything
else in my life or connect with any of my thoughts or beliefs or habits;
it was a wonder, a mystery, a discovery about myself, a discovery
about the whole world. Only in after years did sexual feeling lose that
isolation and spread itself out to illuminate and pervade and at last
possess the whole broad vision of life.

It was in that phase of an urban youth's development, the phase of the
cheap cigarette, that this thing happened. One evening I came by chance
on a number of young people promenading by the light of a row of shops
towards Beckington, and, with all the glory of a glowing cigarette
between my lips, I joined their strolling number. These twilight parades
of young people, youngsters chiefly of the lower middle-class, are one
of the odd social developments of the great suburban growths--unkindly
critics, blind to the inner meanings of things, call them, I believe,
Monkeys' Parades--the shop apprentices, the young work girls, the boy
clerks and so forth, stirred by mysterious intimations, spend their
first-earned money upon collars and ties, chiffon hats, smart lace
collars, walking-sticks, sunshades or cigarettes, and come valiantly
into the vague transfiguring mingling of gaslight and evening, to walk
up and down, to eye meaningly, even t