n an age of small families; I never came to know any woman at all
intimately until I was married to Margaret. My earlier love affairs were
encounters of sex, under conditions of furtiveness and adventure that
made them things in themselves, restricted and unilluminating. From a
boyish disposition to be mystical and worshipping towards women I
had passed into a disregardful attitude, as though women were things
inferior or irrelevant, disturbers in great affairs. For a time Margaret
had blotted out all other women; she was so different and so near;
she was like a person who stands suddenly in front of a little window
through which one has been surveying a crowd. She didn't become
womankind for me so much as eliminate womankind from my world.... And
then came this secret separation....

Until this estrangement and the rapid and uncontrollable development of
my relations with Isabel which chanced to follow it, I seemed to have
solved the problem of women by marriage and disregard. I thought these
things were over. I went about my career with Margaret beside me, her
brow slightly knit, her manner faintly strenuous, helping, helping; and
if we had not altogether abolished sex we had at least so circumscribed
and isolated it that it would not have affected the general tenor of our
lives in the slightest degree if we had.

And then, clothing itself more and more in the form of Isabel and her
problems, this old, this fundamental obsession of my life returned. The
thing stole upon my mind so that I was unaware of its invasion and how
it was changing our long intimacy. I have already compared the lot of
the modern publicist to Machiavelli writing in his study; in his day
women and sex were as disregarded in these high affairs as, let us say,
the chemistry of air or the will of the beasts in the fields; in ours
the case has altogether changed, and woman has come now to stand beside
the tall candles, half in the light, half in the mystery of the
shadows, besetting, interrupting, demanding unrelentingly an altogether
unprecedented attention. I feel that in these matters my life has been
almost typical of my time. Woman insists upon her presence. She is
no longer a mere physical need, an aesthetic bye-play, a sentimental
background; she is a moral and intellectual necessity in a man's life.
She comes to the politician and demands, Is she a child or a citizen? Is
she a thing or a soul? She comes to the individual man, as she came
to