w I was the fool of ambition, who opened his box of gold to find
blank emptiness, and now I was a spinner of flimsy thoughts, whose web
tore to rags at a touch. I realised for the first time how much I had
come to depend upon the mind and faith of Isabel, how she had confirmed
me and sustained me, how little strength I had to go on with our
purposes now that she had vanished from my life. She had been the
incarnation of those great abstractions, the saving reality, the voice
that answered back. There was no support that night in the things that
had been. We were alone together on the cliff for ever more!--that was
very pretty in its way, but it had no truth whatever that could help
me now, no ounce of sustaining value. I wanted Isabel that night, no
sentiment or memory of her, but Isabel alive,--to talk to me, to touch
me, to hold me together. I wanted unendurably the dusky gentleness of
her presence, the consolation of her voice.

We were alone together on the cliff! I startled a passing cabman into
interest by laughing aloud at that magnificent and characteristic
sentimentality. What a lie it was, and how satisfying it had been! That
was just where we shouldn't remain. We of all people had no distinction
from that humanity whose lot is to forget. We should go out to other
interests, new experiences, new demands. That tall and intricate fabric
of ambitious understandings we had built up together in our intimacy
would be the first to go; and last perhaps to endure with us would be
a few gross memories of sights and sounds, and trivial incidental
excitements....

I had a curious feeling that night that I had lost touch with life for
a long time, and had now been reminded of its quality. That infernal
little don's parody of my ruling phrase, "Hate and coarse thinking,"
stuck in my thoughts like a poisoned dart, a centre of inflammation.
Just as a man who is debilitated has no longer the vitality to resist
an infection, so my mind, slackened by the crisis of my separation from
Isabel, could find no resistance to his emphatic suggestion. It seemed
to me that what he had said was overpoweringly true, not only of
contemporary life, but of all possible human life. Love is the rare
thing, the treasured thing; you lock it away jealously and watch, and
well you may; hate and aggression and force keep the streets and rule
the world. And fine thinking is, in the rough issues of life, weak
thinking, is a balancing indecisive proces