e fell into a discussion of the
changing qualities of Liberalism. It was a good give-and-take talk,
extraordinarily refreshing after the nonsense and crowding secondary
issues of the electioneering outside. We all contributed more or less
except Miss Gamer; Margaret followed with knitted brows and occasional
interjections. "People won't SEE that," for example, and "It all seems
so plain to me." The doctor showed himself clever but unsubstantial and
inconsistent. Isabel sat back with her black mop of hair buried deep in
the chair looking quickly from face to face. Her colour came and went
with her vivid intellectual excitement; occasionally she would dart
a word, usually a very apt word, like a lizard's tongue into the
discussion. I remember chiefly that a chance illustration betrayed that
she had read Bishop Burnet....

After that it was not surprising that Isabel should ask for a lift in
our car as far as the Lurky Committee Room, and that she should offer
me quite sound advice EN ROUTE upon the intellectual temperament of the
Lurky gasworkers.

On the third occasion that I saw Isabel she was, as I have said,
climbing a tree--and a very creditable tree--for her own private
satisfaction. It was a lapse from the high seriousness of politics, and
I perceived she felt that I might regard it as such and attach too much
importance to it. I had some difficulty in reassuring her. And it's odd
to note now--it has never occurred to me before--that from that day to
this I do not think I have ever reminded Isabel of that encounter.

And after that memory she seems to be flickering about always in the
election, an inextinguishable flame; now she flew by on her bicycle,
now she dashed into committee rooms, now she appeared on doorsteps in
animated conversation with dubious voters; I took every chance I could
to talk to her--I had never met anything like her before in the world,
and she interested me immensely--and before the polling day she and I
had become, in the frankest simplicity, fast friends....

That, I think, sets out very fairly the facts of our early relationship.
But it is hard to get it true, either in form or texture, because of
the bright, translucent, coloured, and refracting memories that come
between. One forgets not only the tint and quality of thoughts and
impressions through that intervening haze, one forgets them altogether.
I don't remember now that I ever thought in those days of passionate
love or the po