think I can understand, oh!
half the wrongdoing and blundering in the world.

I do not feel now the logical force of the process that must have
convinced me then that I had made my sacrifice and spent my strength in
vain. At no time had I been under any illusion that the Tory party had
higher ideals than any other party, yet it came to me like a thing newly
discovered that the men I had to work with had for the most part no such
dreams, no sense of any collective purpose, no atom of the faith I held.
They were just as immediately intent upon personal ends, just as limited
by habits of thought, as the men in any other group or party. Perhaps I
had slipped unawares for a time into the delusions of a party man--but I
do not think so.

No, it was the mood of profound despondency that had followed upon the
abrupt cessation of my familiar intercourse with Isabel, that gave this
fact that had always been present in my mind its quality of devastating
revelation. It seemed as though I had never seen before nor suspected
the stupendous gap between the chaotic aims, the routine, the
conventional acquiescences, the vulgarisations of the personal life, and
that clearly conscious development and service of a collective thought
and purpose at which my efforts aimed. I had thought them but a little
way apart, and now I saw they were separated by all the distance
between earth and heaven. I saw now in myself and every one around me,
a concentration upon interests close at hand, an inability to detach
oneself from the provocations, tendernesses, instinctive hates, dumb
lusts and shy timidities that touched one at every point; and, save
for rare exalted moments, a regardlessness of broader aims and remoter
possibilities that made the white passion of statecraft seem as
unearthly and irrelevant to human life as the story an astronomer will
tell, half proven but altogether incredible, of habitable planets and
answering intelligences, suns' distances uncounted across the deep. It
seemed to me I had aspired too high and thought too far, had mocked my
own littleness by presumption, had given the uttermost dear reality of
life for a theoriser's dream.

All through that wandering agony of mine that night a dozen threads of
thought interwove; now I was a soul speaking in protest to God against
a task too cold and high for it, and now I was an angry man, scorned and
pointed upon, who had let life cheat him of the ultimate pride of his
soul. No