ssibility of such love between us. I may have done so
again and again. But I doubt it very strongly. I don't think I ever
thought of such aspects. I had no more sense of any danger between us,
seeing the years and things that separated us, than I could have had if
she had been an intelligent bright-eyed bird. Isabel came into my
life as a new sort of thing; she didn't join on at all to my previous
experiences of womanhood. They were not, as I have laboured to explain,
either very wide or very penetrating experiences, on the whole,
"strangled dinginess" expresses them, but I do not believe they were
narrower or shallower than those of many other men of my class. I
thought of women as pretty things and beautiful things, pretty rather
than beautiful, attractive and at times disconcertingly attractive,
often bright and witty, but, because of the vast reservations that hid
them from me, wanting, subtly and inevitably wanting, in understanding.
My idealisation of Margaret had evaporated insensibly after our
marriage. The shrine I had made for her in my private thoughts stood
at last undisguisedly empty. But Isabel did not for a moment admit of
either idealisation or interested contempt. She opened a new sphere
of womanhood to me. With her steady amber-brown eyes, her unaffected
interest in impersonal things, her upstanding waistless blue body, her
energy, decision and courage, she seemed rather some new and infinitely
finer form of boyhood than a feminine creature, as I had come to measure
femininity. She was my perfect friend. Could I have foreseen, had my
world been more wisely planned, to this day we might have been such
friends.

She seemed at that time unconscious of sex, though she has told me since
how full she was of protesting curiosities and restrained emotions. She
spoke, as indeed she has always spoken, simply, clearly, and vividly;
schoolgirl slang mingled with words that marked ample voracious reading,
and she moved quickly with the free directness of some graceful young
animal. She took many of the easy freedoms a man or a sister might have
done with me. She would touch my arm, lay a hand on my shoulder as I
sat, adjust the lapel of a breast-pocket as she talked to me. She says
now she loved me always from the beginning. I doubt if there was a
suspicion of that in her mind those days. I used to find her regarding
me with the clearest, steadiest gaze in the world, exactly like the gaze
of some nice healthy innoc