Ever since the Kinghamstead election I had maintained what seemed a desultory friendship with Isabel.At first it was rather Isabel kept it up than I.Whenever Margaret and I went down to that villa, with its three or four acres of garden and shrubbery about it, which fulfilled our election promise to live at Kinghamstead, Isabel would turn up in a state of frank cheerfulness, rejoicing at us, and talk all she was reading and thinking to me, and stay for all the rest of the day.In her shameless liking for me she was as natural as a savage.She would exercise me vigorously at tennis, while Margaret lay and rested her back in the afternoon, or guide me for some long ramble that dodged the suburban and congested patches of the constituency with amazing skill.She took possession of me in that unabashed, straight-minded way a girl will sometimes adopt with a man, chose my path or criticised my game with a motherly solicitude for my welfare that was absurd and delightful.And we talked.We discussed and criticised the stories of novels, scraps of history, pictures, social questions, socialism, the policy of the Government.
She was young and most unevenly informed, but she was amazingly sharp and quick and good.Never before in my life had I known a girl of her age, or a woman of her quality.I had never dreamt there was such talk in the world.Kinghamstead became a lightless place when she went to Oxford.Heaven knows how much that may not have precipitated my abandonment of the seat!
She went to Ridout College, Oxford, and that certainly weighed with me when presently after my breach with the Liberals various little undergraduate societies began to ask for lectures and discussions.
I favoured Oxford.I declared openly I did so because of her.At that time I think we neither of us suspected the possibility of passion that lay like a coiled snake in the path before us.It seemed to us that we had the quaintest, most delightful friendship in the world; she was my pupil, and I was her guide, philosopher, and friend.People smiled indulgently--even Margaret smiled indulgently--at our attraction for one another.
Such friendships are not uncommon nowadays--among easy-going, liberal-minded people.For the most part, there's no sort of harm, as people say, in them.The two persons concerned are never supposed to think of the passionate love that hovers so close to the friendship, or if they do, then they banish the thought.I think we kept the thought as permanently in exile as any one could do.If it did in odd moments come into our heads we pretended elaborately it wasn't there.
Only we were both very easily jealous of each other's attention, and tremendously insistent upon each other's preference.
I remember once during the Oxford days an intimation that should have set me thinking, and I suppose discreetly disentangling myself.
It was one Sunday afternoon, and it must have been about May, for the trees and shrubs of Ridout College were gay with blossom, and fresh with the new sharp greens of spring.I had walked talking with Isabel and a couple of other girls through the wide gardens of the place, seen and criticised the new brick pond, nodded to the daughter of this friend and that in the hammocks under the trees, and picked a way among the scattered tea-parties on the lawn to our own circle on the grass under a Siberian crab near the great bay window.There I sat and ate great quantities of cake, and discussed the tactics of the Suffragettes.I had made some comments upon the spirit of the movement in an address to the men in Pembroke, and it had got abroad, and a group of girls and women dons were now having it out with me.
I forget the drift of the conversation, or what it was made Isabel interrupt me.She did interrupt me.She bad been lying prone on the ground at my right hand, chin on fists, listening thoughtfully, and I was sitting beside old Lady Evershead on a garden seat.Iturned to Isabel's voice, and saw her face uplifted, and her dear cheeks and nose and forehead all splashed and barred with sunlight and the shadows of the twigs of the trees behind me.And something--an infinite tenderness, stabbed me.It was a keen physical feeling, like nothing I had ever felt before.It had a quality of tears in it.For the first time in my narrow and concentrated life another human being had really thrust into my being and gripped my very heart.
Our eyes met perplexed for an extraordinary moment.Then I turned back and addressed myself a little stiffly to the substance of her intervention.For some time I couldn't look at her again.
From that time forth I knew I loved Isabel beyond measure.
