ncalculable necessities will play in them. And in
friendship and still more here, in this central business of love,
accident rules it seems to me almost altogether. What personalities you
will encounter in life, and have for a chief interest in life, is nearly
as much a matter of chance as the drift of a grain of pollen in the
pine forest. And once the light hazard has blown it has blown, never to
drive again. In other schoolrooms and nurseries, in slum living-rooms
perhaps or workhouse wards or palaces, round the other side of the
earth, in Canada or Russia or China, other little creatures are trying
their small limbs, clutching at things about them with infantile hands,
who someday will come into your life with a power and magic monstrous
and irrational and irresistible. They will break the limits of your
concentrating self, call you out to the service of beauty and the
service of the race, sound you to your highest and your lowest, give you
your chance to be godlike or filthy, divine or utterly ignoble, react
together with you upon the very core and essence of your being. These
unknowns are the substance of your fate. You will in extreme intimacy
love them, hate them, serve them, struggle with them, and in that
interaction the vital force in you and the substance of your days will
be spent.

And who they may chance to be and their peculiar quality and effect is
haphazard, utterly beyond designing.

Law and custom conspire with the natural circumstances of man to
exaggerate every consequence of this accumulating accident, and make it
definite and fatal....

I find it quite impossible now to recall the steps and stages by which
this power of sex invaded my life. It seems to me now that it began very
much as a gale begins, in catspaws upon the water and little rustlings
among the leaves, and then stillness and then a distant soughing again
and a pause, and then a wider and longer disturbance and so more and
more, with a gathering continuity, until at last the stars were hidden,
the heavens were hidden; all the heights and depths of life were
obscured by stormy impulses and passionate desires. I suppose that
quite at the first there were simple curiosities; no doubt they were
vivid at the time but they have left scarcely a trace; there were vague
first intimations of a peculiar excitement. I do remember more
distinctly phases when there was a going-out from myself towards these
things, these interests, and then a reac