tion of shame and concealment.

And these memories were mixed up with others not sexual at all, and
particularly with the perception of beauty in things inanimate, with
lights seen at twilight and the tender mysteriousness of the dusk and
the confused disturbing scents of flowers in the evening and the
enigmatical serene animation of stars in the summer sky....

I think perhaps that my boyhood was exceptionally free from vulgarizing
influences in this direction. There were few novels in my father's house
and I neither saw nor read any plays until I was near manhood, so that I
thought naturally about love and not rather artificially round and about
love as so many imaginative young people are trained to do. I fell in
love once or twice while I was still quite a boy. These earliest
experiences rarely got beyond a sort of dumb awe, a vague, vast,
ineffectual desire for self-immolation. For a time I remember I
worshipped Lady Ladislaw with all my being. Then I talked to a girl in a
train--I forget upon what journey--but I remember very vividly her quick
color and a certain roguish smile. I spread my adoration at her feet,
fresh and frank. I wanted to write to her. Indeed I wanted to devote all
my being to her. I begged hard, but there was someone called Auntie who
had to be considered, an Atropos for that thread of romance.

Then there was a photograph in my father's study of the Delphic Sibyl
from the Sistine Chapel, that for a time held my heart, and--Yes, there
was a girl in a tobacconist's shop in the Harbury High Street. Drawn by
an irresistible impulse I used to go and buy cigarettes--and sometimes
converse about the weather. But afterwards in solitude I would meditate
tremendous conversations and encounters with her. The cigarettes
increased the natural melancholy of my state and led to a reproof from
old Henson. Almost always I suppose there is that girl in the
tobacconist's shop....

I believe if I made an effort I could disinter some dozens of such
memories, more and more faded until the marginal ones would be
featureless and all but altogether effaced. As I look back at it now I
am struck by an absurd image; it is as if a fish nibbled at this bait
and then at that.

Given but the slightest aid from accidental circumstances and any of
those slight attractions might have become a power to deflect all my
life.

The day of decision arrived when, the Lady Mary Christian came smiling
out of the sunshine to me in