ought of that before--it isn't natural to think of that before.
We hadn't known. There is no literature in English dealing with such
things.

There is a necessary sequence of phases in love. These came in their
order, and with them, unanticipated tarnishings on the first bright
perfection of our relations. For a time these developing phases were
no more than a secret and private trouble between us, little shadows
spreading by imperceptible degrees across that vivid and luminous cell.

8

The Handitch election flung me suddenly into prominence.

It is still only two years since that struggle, and I will not trouble
the reader with a detailed history of events that must be quite
sufficiently present in his mind for my purpose already. Huge stacks of
journalism have dealt with Handitch and its significance. For the reader
very probably, as for most people outside a comparatively small circle,
it meant my emergence from obscurity. We obtruded no editor's name in
the BLUE WEEKLY; I had never as yet been on the London hoardings. Before
Handitch I was a journalist and writer of no great public standing;
after Handitch, I was definitely a person, in the little group of
persons who stood for the Young Imperialist movement. Handitch was, to a
very large extent, my affair. I realised then, as a man comes to do, how
much one can still grow after seven and twenty. In the second election
I was a man taking hold of things; at Kinghamstead I had been simply a
young candidate, a party unit, led about the constituency, told to
do this and that, and finally washed in by the great Anti-Imperialist
flood, like a starfish rolling up a beach.

My feminist views had earnt the mistrust of the party, and I do not
think I should have got the chance of Handitch or indeed any chance at
all of Parliament for a long time, if it had not been that the seat with
its long record of Liberal victories and its Liberal majority of 3642 at
the last election, offered a hopeless contest. The Liberal dissensions
and the belated but by no means contemptible Socialist candidate were
providential interpositions. I think, however, the conduct of Gane,
Crupp, and Tarvrille in coming down to fight for me, did count
tremendously in my favour. "We aren't going to win, perhaps," said
Crupp, "but we are going to talk." And until the very eve of victory, we
treated Handitch not so much as a battlefield as a hoarding. And so it
was the Endowment of Motherhood as