and
argued and kissed me with wet salt lips, and wept in my arms; she told
me that now passionate longing for me and my intimate life possessed
her, so that she could not work, could not think, could not endure other
people for the love of me....

I fled absurdly. That is the secret of the futile journey to America
that puzzled all my friends.

I ran away from Isabel. I took hold of the situation with all my
strength, put in Britten with sketchy, hasty instructions to edit the
paper, and started headlong and with luggage, from which, among other
things, my shaving things were omitted, upon a tour round the world.

Preposterous flight that was! I remember as a thing almost farcical my
explanations to Margaret, and how frantically anxious I was to prevent
the remote possibility of her coming with me, and how I crossed in the
TUSCAN, a bad, wet boat, and mixed seasickness with ungovernable sorrow.
I wept--tears. It was inexpressibly queer and ridiculous--and, good God!
how I hated my fellow-passengers!

New York inflamed and excited me for a time, and when things slackened,
I whirled westward to Chicago--eating and drinking, I remember, in the
train from shoals of little dishes, with a sort of desperate voracity.
I did the queerest things to distract myself--no novelist would dare to
invent my mental and emotional muddle. Chicago also held me at first,
amazing lapse from civilisation that the place is! and then abruptly,
with hosts expecting me, and everything settled for some days in Denver,
I found myself at the end of my renunciations, and turned and came back
headlong to London.

Let me confess it wasn't any sense of perfect and incurable trust and
confidence that brought me back, or any idea that now I had strength to
refrain. It was a sudden realisation that after all the separation might
succeed; some careless phrasing in one of her jealously read letters set
that idea going in my mind--the haunting perception that I might return
to London and find it empty of the Isabel who had pervaded it. Honour,
discretion, the careers of both of us, became nothing at the thought. I
couldn't conceive my life resuming there without Isabel. I couldn't, in
short, stand it.

I don't even excuse my return. It is inexcusable. I ought to have kept
upon my way westward--and held out. I couldn't. I wanted Isabel, and
I wanted her so badly now that everything else in the world was
phantom-like until that want was satisfied. Perhaps