ory must stand.

But if there is no justification there is at least a very effective
excuse in the mental confusedness of our time. The evasion of that
passionately thorough exposition of belief and of the grounds of
morality, which is the outcome of the mercenary religious compromises of
the late Vatican period, the stupid suppression of anything but the most
timid discussion of sexual morality in our literature and drama, the
pervading cultivated and protected muddle-headedness, leaves mentally
vigorous people with relatively enormous possibilities of destruction
and little effective help. They find themselves confronted by the
habits and prejudices of manifestly commonplace people, and by that
extraordinary patched-up Christianity, the cult of a "Bromsteadised"
deity, diffused, scattered, and aimless, which hides from examination
and any possibility of faith behind the plea of good taste. A god about
whom there is delicacy is far worse than no god at all. We are FORCED to
be laws unto ourselves and to live experimentally. It is inevitable that
a considerable fraction of just that bolder, more initiatory section of
the intellectual community, the section that can least be spared from
the collective life in a period of trial and change, will drift into
such emotional crises and such disaster as overtook us. Most perhaps
will escape, but many will go down, many more than the world can spare.
It is the unwritten law of all our public life, and the same holds true
of America, that an honest open scandal ends a career. England in the
last quarter of a century has wasted half a dozen statesmen on this
score; she would, I believe, reject Nelson now if he sought to serve
her. Is it wonderful that to us fretting here in exile this should seem
the cruellest as well as the most foolish elimination of a necessary
social element? It destroys no vice; for vice hides by nature. It
not only rewards dullness as if it were positive virtue, but sets an
enormous premium upon hypocrisy. That is my case, and that is why I am
telling this side of my story with so much explicitness.

2

Ever since the Kinghamstead election I had maintained what seemed a
desultory friendship with Isabel. At first it was rather Isabel kept
it up than I. Whenever Margaret and I went down to that villa, with its
three or four acres of garden and shrubbery about it, which fulfilled
our election promise to live at Kinghamstead, Isabel would turn up in
a s