and I find it too subtle and
involved and intricate for the doing. I find it taxes all my powers to
convey even the main forms and forces in that development. It is like
looking through moving media of changing hue and variable refraction
at something vitally unstable. Broad theories and generalisations are
mingled with personal influences, with prevalent prejudices; and
not only coloured but altered by phases of hopefulness and moods of
depression. The web is made up of the most diverse elements, beyond
treatment multitudinous.... For a week or so I desisted altogether,
and walked over the mountains and returned to sit through the warm soft
mornings among the shaded rocks above this little perched-up house of
ours, discussing my difficulties with Isabel and I think on the whole
complicating them further in the effort to simplify them to manageable
and stateable elements.

Let me, nevertheless, attempt a rough preliminary analysis of this
confused process. A main strand is quite easily traceable. This main
strand is the story of my obvious life, my life as it must have looked
to most of my acquaintances. It presents you with a young couple,
bright, hopeful, and energetic, starting out under Altiora's auspices to
make a career. You figure us well dressed and active, running about in
motor-cars, visiting in great people's houses, dining amidst brilliant
companies, going to the theatre, meeting in the lobby. Margaret wore
hundreds of beautiful dresses. We must have had an air of succeeding
meritoriously during that time.

We did very continually and faithfully serve our joint career. I thought
about it a great deal, and did and refrained from doing ten thousand
things for the sake of it. I kept up a solicitude for it, as it were by
inertia, long after things had happened and changes occurred in me
that rendered its completion impossible. Under certain very artless
pretences, we wanted steadfastly to make a handsome position in the
world, achieve respect, SUCCEED. Enormous unseen changes had been in
progress for years in my mind and the realities of my life, before
our general circle could have had any inkling of their existence, or
suspected the appearances of our life. Then suddenly our proceedings
began to be deflected, our outward unanimity visibly strained and marred
by the insurgence of these so long-hidden developments.

That career had its own hidden side, of course; but when I write
of these unseen factors I do