and shining in our
lives. To console ourselves in our separation we had made out of
the BLUE WEEKLY and our young Tory movement preposterously enormous
things-as though those poor fertilising touches at the soil were indeed
the germinating seeds of the millennium, as though a million lives such
as ours had not to contribute before the beginning of the beginning.
That poor pretence had failed. That magnificent proposition shrivelled
to nothing in the black loneliness of that night.

I saw that there were to be no such compensations. So far as my real
services to mankind were concerned I had to live an unrecognised
and unrewarded life. If I made successes it would be by the way. Our
separation would alter nothing of that. My scandal would cling to me
now for all my life, a thing affecting relationships, embarrassing and
hampering my spirit. I should follow the common lot of those who live by
the imagination, and follow it now in infinite loneliness of soul; the
one good comforter, the one effectual familiar, was lost to me for
ever; I should do good and evil together, no one caring to understand;
I should produce much weary work, much bad-spirited work, much absolute
evil; the good in me would be too often ill-expressed and missed or
misinterpreted. In the end I might leave one gleaming flake or so amidst
the slag heaps for a moment of postmortem sympathy. I was afraid beyond
measure of my derelict self. Because I believed with all my soul in love
and fine thinking that did not mean that I should necessarily either
love steadfastly or think finely. I remember how I fell talking to
God--I think I talked out loud. "Why do I care for these things?"
I cried, "when I can do so little! Why am I apart from the jolly
thoughtless fighting life of men? These dreams fade to nothingness, and
leave me bare!"

I scolded. "Why don't you speak to a man, show yourself? I thought I
had a gleam of you in Isabel,--and then you take her away. Do you really
think I can carry on this game alone, doing your work in darkness and
silence, living in muddled conflict, half living, half dying?"

Grotesque analogies arose in my mind. I discovered a strange parallelism
between my now tattered phrase of "Love and fine thinking" and the
"Love and the Word" of Christian thought. Was it possible the Christian
propaganda had at the outset meant just that system of attitudes I had
been feeling my way towards from the very beginning of my life? Had
I spen