lways
thinking right, and that she was always saying wrong. It was that I was
struggling to get hold of a difficult thing that was, at any rate, half
true, I could not gauge how true, and that Margaret's habitual phrasing
ignored these elusive elements of truth, and without premeditation
fitted into the weaknesses of my new intimations, as though they had
nothing but weaknesses. It was, for example, obvious that these big
people, who were the backbone of Imperialism and Conservatism, were
temperamentally lax, much more indolent, much more sensuous, than our
deliberately virtuous Young Liberals. I didn't want to be reminded of
that, just when I was in full effort to realise the finer elements in
their composition. Margaret classed them and disposed of them. It was
our incurable differences in habits and gestures of thought coming
between us again.

The desert of misunderstanding widened. I was forced back upon myself
and my own secret councils. For a time I went my way alone; an unmixed
evil for both of us. Except for that Pentagram evening, a series of
talks with Isabel Rivers, who was now becoming more and more important
in my intellectual life, and the arguments I maintained with Crupp, I
never really opened my mind at all during that period of indecisions,
slow abandonments, and slow acquisitions.

CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ SECESSION

1

At last, out of a vast accumulation of impressions, decision distilled
quite suddenly. I succumbed to Evesham and that dream of the right
thing triumphant through expression. I determined I would go over to
the Conservatives, and use my every gift and power on the side of such
forces on that side as made for educational reorganisation, scientific
research, literature, criticism, and intellectual development. That was
in 1909. I judged the Tories were driving straight at a conflict with
the country, and I thought them bound to incur an electoral defeat. I
under-estimated their strength in the counties. There would follow, I
calculated, a period of profound reconstruction in method and policy
alike. I was entirely at one with Crupp in perceiving in this an immense
opportunity for the things we desired. An aristocracy quickened by
conflict and on the defensive, and full of the idea of justification
by reconstruction, might prove altogether more apt for thought and
high professions than Mrs. Redmondson's spoilt children. Behind the now
inevitable struggle for a reform of the Ho