sunlit paper might be lamp-lit and lying on my old desk.
I see it all again, feel it all again. In the foreground is a green
shaded lamp and crumpled galley slips and paged proofs and letters, two
or three papers in manuscript, and so forth. In the shadows are chairs
and another table bearing papers and books, a rotating bookcase dimly
seen, a long window seat black in the darkness, and then the cool
unbroken spectacle of the window. How often I would watch some tram-car,
some string of barges go from me slowly out of sight. The people were
black animalculae by day, clustering, collecting, dispersing, by night,
they were phantom face-specks coming, vanishing, stirring obscurely
between light and shade.

I recall many hours at my desk in that room before the crisis came,
hours full of the peculiar happiness of effective strenuous work. Once
some piece of writing went on, holding me intent and forgetful of time
until I looked up from the warm circle of my electric lamp to see the
eastward sky above the pale silhouette of the Tower Bridge, flushed and
banded brightly with the dawn.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH ~~ THE BESETTING OF SEX

1

Art is selection and so is most autobiography. But I am concerned with a
more tangled business than selection, I want to show a contemporary man
in relation to the state and social usage, and the social organism in
relation to that man. To tell my story at all I have to simplify. I have
given now the broad lines of my political development, and how I passed
from my initial liberal-socialism to the conception of a constructive
aristocracy. I have tried to set that out in the form of a man
discovering himself. Incidentally that self-development led to a
profound breach with my wife. One has read stories before of husband
and wife speaking severally two different languages and coming to an
understanding. But Margaret and I began in her dialect, and, as I came
more and more to use my own, diverged.

I had thought when I married that the matter of womankind had ended for
me. I have tried to tell all that sex and women had been to me up to my
married life with Margaret and our fatal entanglement, tried to show the
queer, crippled, embarrassed and limited way in which these interests
break upon the life of a young man under contemporary conditions. I
do not think my lot was a very exceptional one. I missed the chance of
sisters and girl playmates, but that is not an uncommon misadventure
i