de. Deliberately I say, dirty. It
didn't seem so at first--"

I stopped blankly. "Dirty," I thought, was the most idiotic choice of
words to have made.

I had never in any tolerable sense of the word been dirty.

"I drifted into this--as men do," I said after a little pause and
stopped again.

She was looking at me with her wide blue eyes.

"Did you imagine," she began, "that I thought you--that I expected--"

"But how can you know?"

"I know. I do know."

"But--" I began.

"I know," she persisted, dropping her eyelids. "Of course I know," and
nothing could have convinced me more completely that she did not know.

"All men--" she generalised. "A woman does not understand these
temptations."

I was astonished beyond measure at her way of taking my confession. ...

"Of course," she said, hesitating a little over a transparent
difficulty, "it is all over and past."

"It's all over and past," I answered.

There was a little pause.

"I don't want to know," she said. "None of that seems to matter now in
the slightest degree."

She looked up and smiled as though we had exchanged some acceptable
commonplaces. "Poor dear!" she said, dismissing everything, and put out
her arms, and it seemed to me that I could hear the Lettish girl in
the background--doomed safety valve of purity in this intolerable
world--telling something in indistinguishable German--I know not what
nor why....

I took Margaret in my arms and kissed her. Her eyes were wet with tears.
She clung to me and was near, I felt, to sobbing.

"I have loved you," she whispered presently, "Oh! ever since we met in
Misterton--six years and more ago."

CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ MARGARET IN VENICE

1

There comes into my mind a confused memory of conversations with
Margaret; we must have had dozens altogether, and they mix in now for
the most part inextricably not only with one another, but with later
talks and with things we discussed at Pangbourne. We had the immensest
anticipations of the years and opportunities that lay before us. I was
now very deeply in love with her indeed. I felt not that I had cleaned
up my life but that she had. We called each other "confederate" I
remember, and made during our brief engagement a series of visits to the
various legislative bodies in London, the County Council, the House of
Commons, where we dined with Villiers, and the St. Pancras Vestry, where
we heard Shaw speaking. I was full of plans and so was