the world. Perhaps that is
the way to live. Perhaps there is no other method than this effectual
annihilation of half--and the most sympathetic and attractive half--of
the human beings in the world, so far as any frank intercourse is
concerned. I am quite convinced anyhow that such a qualified intimacy
as ours, such a drifting into the sense of possession, such untrammeled
conversation with an invisible, implacable limit set just where the
intimacy glows, it is no kind of tolerable compromise. If men and women
are to go so far together, they must be free to go as far as they may
want to go, without the vindictive destruction that has come upon us.
On the basis of the accepted codes the jealous people are right, and the
liberal-minded ones are playing with fire. If people are not to love,
then they must be kept apart. If they are not to be kept apart, then we
must prepare for an unprecedented toleration of lovers.

Isabel was as unforeseeing as I to begin with, but sex marches into the
life of an intelligent girl with demands and challenges far more urgent
than the mere call of curiosity and satiable desire that comes to a
young man. No woman yet has dared to tell the story of that unfolding.
She attracted men, and she encouraged them, and watched them, and tested
them, and dismissed them, and concealed the substance of her thoughts
about them in the way that seems instinctive in a natural-minded girl.
There was even an engagement--amidst the protests and disapproval of
the college authorities. I never saw the man, though she gave me a long
history of the affair, to which I listened with a forced and insincere
sympathy. She struck me oddly as taking the relationship for a thing
in itself, and regardless of its consequences. After a time she became
silent about him, and then threw him over; and by that time, I think,
for all that she was so much my junior, she knew more about herself and
me than I was to know for several years to come.

We didn't see each other for some months after my resignation, but we
kept up a frequent correspondence. She said twice over that she wanted
to talk to me, that letters didn't convey what one wanted to say, and
I went up to Oxford pretty definitely to see her--though I combined it
with one or two other engagements--somewhere in February. Insensibly she
had become important enough for me to make journeys for her.

But we didn't see very much of one another on that occasion. There was
som