tate of frank cheerfulness, rejoicing at us, and talk all she was
reading and thinking to me, and stay for all the rest of the day. In
her shameless liking for me she was as natural as a savage. She would
exercise me vigorously at tennis, while Margaret lay and rested her
back in the afternoon, or guide me for some long ramble that dodged the
suburban and congested patches of the constituency with amazing skill.
She took possession of me in that unabashed, straight-minded way a girl
will sometimes adopt with a man, chose my path or criticised my
game with a motherly solicitude for my welfare that was absurd and
delightful. And we talked. We discussed and criticised the stories of
novels, scraps of history, pictures, social questions, socialism, the
policy of the Government. She was young and most unevenly informed, but
she was amazingly sharp and quick and good. Never before in my life had
I known a girl of her age, or a woman of her quality. I had never dreamt
there was such talk in the world. Kinghamstead became a lightless
place when she went to Oxford. Heaven knows how much that may not have
precipitated my abandonment of the seat!

She went to Ridout College, Oxford, and that certainly weighed with
me when presently after my breach with the Liberals various little
undergraduate societies began to ask for lectures and discussions. I
favoured Oxford. I declared openly I did so because of her. At that time
I think we neither of us suspected the possibility of passion that lay
like a coiled snake in the path before us. It seemed to us that we
had the quaintest, most delightful friendship in the world; she was
my pupil, and I was her guide, philosopher, and friend. People smiled
indulgently--even Margaret smiled indulgently--at our attraction for one
another.

Such friendships are not uncommon nowadays--among easy-going,
liberal-minded people. For the most part, there's no sort of harm, as
people say, in them. The two persons concerned are never supposed to
think of the passionate love that hovers so close to the friendship, or
if they do, then they banish the thought. I think we kept the thought as
permanently in exile as any one could do. If it did in odd moments come
into our heads we pretended elaborately it wasn't there.

Only we were both very easily jealous of each other's attention, and
tremendously insistent upon each other's preference.

I remember once during the Oxford days an intimation that should have