ne how much deliberate
intention I hide from myself in this affair.

Certainly I think some part of me must have been saying in the train:
"Leave go of her. Get away from her. End this now." I can't have been so
stupid as not to have had that in my mind....

If she had been only a beautiful girl in love with me, I think I could
have managed the situation. Once or twice since my marriage and before
Isabel became of any significance in my life, there had been incidents
with other people, flashes of temptation--no telling is possible of
the thing resisted. I think that mere beauty and passion would not
have taken me. But between myself and Isabel things were incurably
complicated by the intellectual sympathy we had, the jolly march of
our minds together. That has always mattered enormously. I should have
wanted her company nearly as badly if she had been some crippled old
lady; we would have hunted shoulder to shoulder, as two men. Only two
men would never have had the patience and readiness for one another
we two had. I had never for years met any one with whom I could be so
carelessly sure of understanding or to whom I could listen so easily
and fully. She gave me, with an extraordinary completeness, that rare,
precious effect of always saying something fresh, and yet saying it so
that it filled into and folded about all the little recesses and corners
of my mind with an infinite, soft familiarity. It is impossible to
explain that. It is like trying to explain why her voice, her voice
heard speaking to any one--heard speaking in another room--pleased my
ears.

She was the only Oxford woman who took a first that year. She spent the
summer in Scotland and Yorkshire, writing to me continually of all she
now meant to do, and stirring my imagination. She came to London for
the autumn session. For a time she stayed with old Lady Colbeck, but she
fell out with her hostess when it became clear she wanted to write, not
novels, but journalism, and then she set every one talking by taking
a flat near Victoria and installing as her sole protector an elderly
German governess she had engaged through a scholastic agency. She began
writing, not in that copious flood the undisciplined young woman of
gifts is apt to produce, but in exactly the manner of an able young man,
experimenting with forms, developing the phrasing of opinions, taking
a definite line. She was, of course, tremendously discussed. She was
disapproved of, but she was