Yet it is curious that it never occurred to me for a year or so that this was likely to be a matter of passion between us.I have told how definitely I put my imagination into harness in those matters at my marriage, and I was living now in a world of big interests, where there is neither much time nor inclination for deliberate love-making.I suppose there is a large class of men who never meet a girl or a woman without thinking of sex, who meet a friend's daughter and decide: "Mustn't get friendly with her--wouldn't DO,"and set invisible bars between themselves and all the wives in the world.Perhaps that is the way to live.Perhaps there is no other method than this effectual annihilation of half--and the most sympathetic and attractive half--of the human beings in the world, so far as any frank intercourse is concerned.I am quite convinced anyhow that such a qualified intimacy as ours, such a drifting into the sense of possession, such untrammeled conversation with an invisible, implacable limit set just where the intimacy glows, it is no kind of tolerable compromise.If men and women are to go so far together, they must be free to go as far as they may want to go, without the vindictive destruction that has come upon us.On the basis of the accepted codes the jealous people are right, and the liberal-minded ones are playing with fire.If people are not to love, then they must be kept apart.If they are not to be kept apart, then we must prepare for an unprecedented toleration of lovers.
Isabel was as unforeseeing as I to begin with, but sex marches into the life of an intelligent girl with demands and challenges far more urgent than the mere call of curiosity and satiable desire that comes to a young man.No woman yet has dared to tell the story of that unfolding.She attracted men, and she encouraged them, and watched them, and tested them, and dismissed them, and concealed the substance of her thoughts about them in the way that seems instinctive in a natural-minded girl.There was even an engagement--amidst the protests and disapproval of the college authorities.Inever saw the man, though she gave me a long history of the affair, to which I listened with a forced and insincere sympathy.She struck me oddly as taking the relationship for a thing in itself, and regardless of its consequences.After a time she became silent about him, and then threw him over; and by that time, I think, for all that she was so much my junior, she knew more about herself and me than I was to know for several years to come.
We didn't see each other for some months after my resignation, but we kept up a frequent correspondence.She said twice over that she wanted to talk to me, that letters didn't convey what one wanted to say, and I went up to Oxford pretty definitely to see her--though Icombined it with one or two other engagements--somewhere in February.Insensibly she had become important enough for me to make journeys for her.
But we didn't see very much of one another on that occasion.There was something in the air between us that made a faint embarrassment;the mere fact, perhaps, that she had asked me to come up.
A year before she would have dashed off with me quite unscrupulously to talk alone, carried me off to her room for an hour with a minute of chaperonage to satisfy the rules.Now there was always some one or other near us that it seemed impossible to exorcise.
We went for a walk on the Sunday afternoon with old Fortescue, K.
C., who'd come up to see his two daughters, both great friends of Isabel's, and some mute inglorious don whose name I forget, but who was in a state of marked admiration for her.The six of us played a game of conversational entanglements throughout, and mostly I was impressing the Fortescue girls with the want of mental concentration possible in a rising politician.We went down Carfex, I remember, to Folly Bridge, and inspected the Barges, and then back by way of Merton to the Botanic Gardens and Magdalen Bridge.And in the Botanic Gardens she got almost her only chance with me.
"Last months at Oxford," she said.
"And then?" I asked.
"I'm coming to London," she said.
"To write?"
She was silent for a moment.Then she said abruptly, with that quick flush of hers and a sudden boldness in her eyes: "I'm going to work with you.Why shouldn't I?"3
Here, again, I suppose I had a fair warning of the drift of things.
I seem to remember myself in the train to Paddington, sitting with a handful of papers--galley proofs for the BLUE WEEKLY, I suppose--on my lap, and thinking about her and that last sentence of hers, and all that it might mean to me.
It is very hard to recall even the main outline of anything so elusive as a meditation.I know that the idea of working with her gripped me, fascinated me.That my value in her life seemed growing filled me with pride and a kind of gratitude.I was already in no doubt that her value in my life was tremendous.It made it none the less, that in those days I was obsessed by the idea that she was transitory, and bound to go out of my life again.It is no good trying to set too fine a face upon this complex business, there is gold and clay and sunlight and savagery in every love story, and a multitude of elvish elements peeped out beneath the fine rich curtain of affection that masked our future.I've never properly weighed how immensely my vanity was gratified by her clear preference for me.Nor can I for a moment determine how much deliberate intention I hide from myself in this affair.
Certainly I think some part of me must have been saying in the train: "Leave go of her.Get away from her.End this now." Ican't have been so stupid as not to have had that in my mind....
