ltogether repudiate; I had a persuasion that out of
that I would presently extract a magic to excuse my deceits and
treacheries and assuage my smarting shame. And round these deep central
preoccupations were others of acute exasperation and hatred towards
secondary people. There had been interventions, judgments upon
insufficient evidence, comments, and often quite justifiable comments,
that had filled me with an extraordinary savagery of resentment.

I had a persuasion, illogical but invincible, that I was still entitled
to all the respect due to a man of unblemished honor. I clung fiercely
to the idea that to do dishonorable things isn't necessarily to be
dishonorable.... This state of mind I am describing is, I am convinced,
the state of every man who has involved himself in any affair at once
questionable and passionate. He seems free, but he is not free; he is
the slave of the relentless paradox of his position.

And we were all of us more or less in deep grooves we had made for
ourselves, Philip, Guy, Justin, the friends involved, and all in the
measure of our grooves incapable of tolerance or sympathetic
realization. Even when we slept, the clenched fist of the attitudes we
had assumed gave a direction to our dreams.

You see the same string of events that had produced all this system of
intense preoccupations had also severed me from the possible resumption
of those wider interests out of which our intrigue had taken me. I had
had to leave England and all the political beginnings I had been
planning, and to return to those projects now, those now impossible
projects, was to fall back promptly into hopeless exasperation....

And then the longing, the longing that is like a physical pain, that
hunger of the heart for some one intolerably dear! The desire for a
voice! The arrested habit of phrasing one's thoughts for a hearer who
will listen in peace no more! From that lonely distress even rage, even
the concoction of insult and conflict, was a refuge. From that pitiless
travail of emptiness I was ready to turn desperately to any offer of
excitement and distraction.

From all those things I was to escape at last unhelped, but I want you
to understand particularly these phases through which I passed; it falls
to many and it may fall to you to pass through such a period of darkness
and malign obsession. Make the groove only a little deeper, a little
more unclimbable, make the temperament a little less sanguine, a