set me thinking, and I suppose discreetly disentangling myself. It was
one Sunday afternoon, and it must have been about May, for the trees and
shrubs of Ridout College were gay with blossom, and fresh with the new
sharp greens of spring. I had walked talking with Isabel and a couple of
other girls through the wide gardens of the place, seen and criticised
the new brick pond, nodded to the daughter of this friend and that
in the hammocks under the trees, and picked a way among the scattered
tea-parties on the lawn to our own circle on the grass under a Siberian
crab near the great bay window. There I sat and ate great quantities
of cake, and discussed the tactics of the Suffragettes. I had made some
comments upon the spirit of the movement in an address to the men in
Pembroke, and it had got abroad, and a group of girls and women dons
were now having it out with me.

I forget the drift of the conversation, or what it was made Isabel
interrupt me. She did interrupt me. She had been lying prone on the
ground at my right hand, chin on fists, listening thoughtfully, and
I was sitting beside old Lady Evershead on a garden seat. I turned to
Isabel's voice, and saw her face uplifted, and her dear cheeks and nose
and forehead all splashed and barred with sunlight and the shadows of
the twigs of the trees behind me. And something--an infinite tenderness,
stabbed me. It was a keen physical feeling, like nothing I had ever felt
before. It had a quality of tears in it. For the first time in my narrow
and concentrated life another human being had really thrust into my
being and gripped my very heart.

Our eyes met perplexed for an extraordinary moment. Then I turned
back and addressed myself a little stiffly to the substance of her
intervention. For some time I couldn't look at her again.

From that time forth I knew I loved Isabel beyond measure.

Yet it is curious that it never occurred to me for a year or so that
this was likely to be a matter of passion between us. I have told how
definitely I put my imagination into harness in those matters at my
marriage, and I was living now in a world of big interests, where there
is neither much time nor inclination for deliberate love-making. I
suppose there is a large class of men who never meet a girl or a woman
without thinking of sex, who meet a friend's daughter and decide:
"Mustn't get friendly with her--wouldn't DO," and set invisible bars
between themselves and all the wives in