are and this you must do.
I wondered whether even in the Middle Ages I should have accepted that
ruling without question.

I remember too very distinctly how Effie came and sat beside me on a
little box: that was before the casement window of our room.

"Gloomkins," said she.

I smiled and remained head on hand, looking out of the window forgetful
of her.

"Did you love your wife so well?" she whispered softly.

"Oh!" I cried, recalled again; "I don't know. I don't understand these
things. Life is a thing that hurts, my dear! It hurts without logic or
reason. I've blundered! I didn't understand. Anyhow--there is no need to
go hurting you, is there?"

And I turned about and drew her to me, and kissed her ear....

Yes, I had a very bad time--I still recall. I suffered, I suppose, from
a sort of ennui of the imagination. I found myself without an object to
hold my will together. I sought. I read restlessly and discursively.
I tried Ewart and got no help from him. As I regard it all now in this
retrospect, it seems to me as if in those days of disgust and abandoned
aims I discovered myself for the first time. Before that I had seen only
the world and things in it, had sought them self-forgetful of all but
my impulse. Now I found myself GROUPED with a system of appetites and
satisfactions, with much work to do--and no desire, it seemed, left in
me.

There were moments when I thought of suicide. At times my life appeared
before me in bleak, relentless light, a series of ignorances, crude
blunderings, degradation and cruelty. I had what the old theologians
call a "conviction of sin." I sought salvation--not perhaps in the
formula a Methodist preacher would recognise but salvation nevertheless.

Men find their salvation nowadays in many ways. Names and forms don't, I
think, matter very much; the real need is something that we can hold
and that holds one. I have known a man find that determining factor in
a dry-plate factory, and another in writing a history of the Manor. So
long as it holds one, it does not matter. Many men and women nowadays
take up some concrete aspect of Socialism or social reform. But
Socialism for me has always been a little bit too human, too set about
with personalities and foolishness. It isn't my line. I don't like
things so human. I don't think I'm blind to the fun, the surprises, the
jolly little coarsenesses and insufficiency of life, to the "humour of
it," as people say, and to adventure