n the telling. In the
first place I do not want to seem to confess my sins with a penitence I
am very doubtful if I feel. Now that I have got Isabel we can no doubt
count the cost of it and feel unquenchable regrets, but I am not sure
whether, if we could be put back now into such circumstances as we
were in a year ago, or two years ago, whether with my eyes fully open I
should not do over again very much as I did. And on the other hand I do
not want to justify the things we have done. We are two bad people--if
there is to be any classification of good and bad at all, we have acted
badly, and quite apart from any other considerations we've largely
wasted our own very great possibilities. But it is part of a queer
humour that underlies all this, that I find myself slipping again and
again into a sentimental treatment of our case that is as unpremeditated
as it is insincere. When I am a little tired after a morning's writing
I find the faint suggestion getting into every other sentence that our
blunders and misdeeds embodied, after the fashion of the prophet Hosea,
profound moral truths. Indeed, I feel so little confidence in my ability
to keep this altogether out of my book that I warn the reader here that
in spite of anything he may read elsewhere in the story, intimating
however shyly an esoteric and exalted virtue in our proceedings, the
plain truth of this business is that Isabel and I wanted each other with
a want entirely formless, inconsiderate, and overwhelming. And though I
could tell you countless delightful and beautiful things about Isabel,
were this a book in her praise, I cannot either analyse that want or
account for its extreme intensity.

I will confess that deep in my mind there is a belief in a sort of wild
rightness about any love that is fraught with beauty, but that eludes
me and vanishes again, and is not, I feel, to be put with the real
veracities and righteousnesses and virtues in the paddocks and
menageries of human reason....

We have already a child, and Margaret was childless, and I find myself
prone to insist upon that, as if it was a justification. But, indeed,
when we became lovers there was small thought of Eugenics between us.
Ours was a mutual and not a philoprogenitive passion. Old Nature behind
us may have had such purposes with us, but it is not for us to annex
her intentions by a moralising afterthought. There isn't, in fact, any
decent justification for us whatever--at that the st