lves to a slowly apprehended meaning. I would
feel again with a fresh stab of remorse, that this was not a flash of
adventure, this was not seeing life in any permissible sense, but a dip
into tragedy, dishonour, hideous degradation, and the pitiless cruelty
of a world as yet uncontrolled by any ordered will.

"Good God!" I put it to myself, "that I should finish the work those
Cossacks had begun! I who want order and justice before everything!
There's no way out of it, no decent excuse! If I didn't think, I ought
to have thought!"...

"How did I get to it?"... I would ransack the phases of my development
from the first shy unveiling of a hidden wonder to the last extremity as
a man will go through muddled account books to find some disorganising
error....

I was also involved at that time--I find it hard to place these things
in the exact order of their dates because they were so disconnected
with the regular progress of my work and life--in an intrigue, a clumsy,
sensuous, pretentious, artificially stimulated intrigue, with a Mrs.
Larrimer, a woman living separated from her husband. I will not go
into particulars of that episode, nor how we quarrelled and chafed one
another. She was at once unfaithful and jealous and full of whims
about our meetings; she was careless of our secret, and vulgarised our
relationship by intolerable interpretations; except for some glowing
moments of gratification, except for the recurrent and essentially
vicious desire that drew us back to each other again, we both fretted at
a vexatious and unexpectedly binding intimacy. The interim was full
of the quality of work delayed, of time and energy wasted, of insecure
precautions against scandal and exposure. Disappointment is almost
inherent in illicit love. I had, and perhaps it was part of her
recurrent irritation also, a feeling as though one had followed
something fine and beautiful into a net--into bird lime! These furtive
scuffles, this sneaking into shabby houses of assignation, was what we
had made out of the suggestion of pagan beauty; this was the reality
of our vision of nymphs and satyrs dancing for the joy of life amidst
incessant sunshine. We had laid hands upon the wonder and glory of
bodily love and wasted them....

It was the sense of waste, of finely beautiful possibilities getting
entangled and marred for ever that oppressed me. I had missed, I had
lost. I did not turn from these things after the fashion of the Baileys,