love.

You will learn soon enough as you grow to be a man that beneath the
respectable assumptions of our social life there is an endless intricate
world of subterfuge and hidden and perverted passion,--for all passion
that wears a mask is perversion--and that thousands of people of our
sort are hiding and shamming about their desires, their gratifications,
their true relationships. I do not mean the open offenders, for they are
mostly honest and gallant people, but the men and women who sin in the
shadows, the people who are not clean and scandalous, but immoral and
respectable. This underworld is not for us. I wish that I who have
looked into it could in some way inoculate you now against the
repetition of my misadventure. We Strattons are daylight men, and if I
work now for widened facilities of divorce, for an organized freedom and
independence of women, and greater breadth of toleration, it is because
I know in my own person the degradations, the falsity, the bitterness,
that can lurk beneath the inflexible pretentions of the established code
to-day.

And I want to tell you too of something altogether unforeseen that
happened to us, and that was this, that from the day that passion
carried us and we became in the narrower sense of the word lovers, all
the wider interests we had in common, our political intentions, our
impersonal schemes, began to pass out of our intercourse. Our situation
closed upon us like a trap and hid the sky. Something more intense had
our attention by the feet, and we used our wings no more. I do not think
that we even had the real happiness and beauty and delight of one
another. Because, I tell you, there is no light upon kiss or embrace
that is not done with pride. I do not know why it should be so, but
people of our race and quality are a little ashamed of mere
gratification in love. Always we seem in my memory to have been
whispering with flushed cheeks, and discussing
interminably--_situation_. Had something betrayed us, might something
betray, was this or that sufficiently cunning? Had we perhaps left a
footmark or failed to burn a note, was the second footman who was
detailed as my valet even now pausing astonished in the brushing of my
clothes with our crumpled secret in his hand? Between myself and the
clear vision of this world about me this infernal net-work of
precautions spread like a veil.

And it was not only a matter of concealments but of positive deceptions.
The figure