as one turns from something low and embarrassing. I felt that these
great organic forces were still to be wrought into a harmony with my
constructive passion. I felt too that I was not doing it. I had not
understood the forces in this struggle nor its nature, and as I learnt
I failed. I had been started wrong, I had gone on wrong, in a world that
was muddled and confused, full of false counsel and erratic shames and
twisted temptations. I learnt to see it so by failures that were perhaps
destroying any chance of profit in my lessons. Moods of clear keen
industry alternated with moods of relapse and indulgence and moods of
dubiety and remorse. I was not going on as the Baileys thought I was
going on. There were times when the blindness of the Baileys irritated
me intensely. Beneath the ostensible success of those years, between
twenty-three and twenty-eight, this rottenness, known to scarcely
any one but myself, grew and spread. My sense of the probability of
a collapse intensified. I knew indeed now, even as Willersley had
prophesied five years before, that I was entangling myself in something
that might smother all my uses in the world. Down there among those
incommunicable difficulties, I was puzzled and blundering. I was losing
my hold upon things; the chaotic and adventurous element in life was
spreading upward and getting the better of me, over-mastering me and all
my will to rule and make.... And the strength, the drugging urgency of
the passion!

Margaret shone at times in my imagination like a radiant angel in a
world of mire and disorder, in a world of cravings, hot and dull red
like scars inflamed....

I suppose it was because I had so great a need of such help as her
whiteness proffered, that I could ascribe impossible perfections to
her, a power of intellect, a moral power and patience to which she, poor
fellow mortal, had indeed no claim. If only a few of us WERE angels and
freed from the tangle of effort, how easy life might be! I wanted her so
badly, so very badly, to be what I needed. I wanted a woman to save me.
I forced myself to see her as I wished to see her. Her tepidities became
infinite delicacies, her mental vagueness an atmospheric realism. The
harsh precisions of the Baileys and Altiora's blunt directness threw up
her fineness into relief and made a grace of every weakness.

Mixed up with the memory of times when I talked with Margaret as one
talks politely to those who are hopelessly inferi