us
like killing the best parts of each other; we loved the sight of each
other engaged finely and characteristically, we knew each other best
as activities. We had no delusions about material facts; we didn't want
each other alive or dead, we wanted each other fully alive. We wanted
to do big things together, and for us to take each other openly and
desperately would leave us nothing in the world to do. We wanted
children indeed passionately, but children with every helpful chance in
the world, and children born in scandal would be handicapped at every
turn. We wanted to share a home, and not a solitude.

And when we were at this stage of realisation, began the intimations
that we were found out, and that scandal was afoot against us....

I heard of it first from Esmeer, who deliberately mentioned it,
with that steady grey eye of his watching me, as an instance of the
preposterous falsehoods people will circulate. It came to Isabel
almost simultaneously through a married college friend, who made it her
business to demand either confirmation or denial. It filled us both with
consternation. In the surprise of the moment Isabel admitted her secret,
and her friend went off "reserving her freedom of action."

Discovery broke out in every direction. Friends with grave faces and
an atmosphere of infinite tact invaded us both. Other friends ceased to
invade either of us. It was manifest we had become--we knew not how--a
private scandal, a subject for duologues, an amazement, a perplexity,
a vivid interest. In a few brief weeks it seemed London passed from
absolute unsuspiciousness to a chattering exaggeration of its knowledge
of our relations.

It was just the most inappropriate time for that disclosure. The long
smouldering antagonism to my endowment of motherhood ideas had flared
up into an active campaign in the EXPURGATOR, and it would be altogether
disastrous to us if I should be convicted of any personal irregularity.
It was just because of the manifest and challenging respectability of my
position that I had been able to carry the thing as far as I had done.
Now suddenly my fortunes had sprung a leak, and scandal was pouring
in.... It chanced, too, that a wave of moral intolerance was sweeping
through London, one of those waves in which the bitterness of the
consciously just finds an ally in the panic of the undiscovered. A
certain Father Blodgett had been preaching against social corruption
with extraordinary force