hyness and delicacy about imperatives of the most
arbitrary appearance. What ensues? What did ensue with us, for example?
On the one hand was a great desire, robbed of any appearance of shame
and grossness by the power of love, and on the other hand, the possible
jealousy of so and so, the disapproval of so and so, material risks and
dangers. It is only in the retrospect that we have been able to grasp
something of the effectual case against us. The social prohibition lit
by the intense glow of our passion, presented itself as preposterous,
irrational, arbitrary, and ugly, a monster fit only for mockery. We
might be ruined! Well, there is a phase in every love affair, a sort
of heroic hysteria, when death and ruin are agreeable additions to the
prospect. It gives the business a gravity, a solemnity. Timid people may
hesitate and draw back with a vague instinctive terror of the immensity
of the oppositions they challenge, but neither Isabel nor I are timid
people.

We weighed what was against us. We decided just exactly as scores of
thousands of people have decided in this very matter, that if it were
possible to keep this thing to ourselves, there was nothing against it.
And so we took our first step. With the hunger of love in us, it was
easy to conclude we might be lovers, and still keep everything to
ourselves. That cleared our minds of the one persistent obstacle that
mattered to us--the haunting presence of Margaret.

And then we found, as all those scores of thousands of people scattered
about us have found, that we could not keep it to ourselves. Love will
out. All the rest of this story is the chronicle of that. Love with
sustained secrecy cannot be love. It is just exactly the point people do
not understand.

5

But before things came to that pass, some months and many phases and a
sudden journey to America intervened.

"This thing spells disaster," I said. "You are too big and I am too big
to attempt this secrecy. Think of the intolerable possibility of being
found out! At any cost we have to stop--even at the cost of parting."

"Just because we may be found out!"

"Just because we may be found out."

"Master, I shouldn't in the least mind being found out with you. I'm
afraid--I'd be proud."

"Wait till it happens."

There followed a struggle of immense insincerity between us. It is hard
to tell who urged and who resisted.

She came to me one night to the editorial room of the BLUE WEEKLY,