purposeful amidst its vales and rivers, that emotion of collective ends
and collective purposes has returned to me. I felt as great as humanity.
For a brief moment I was humanity, looking at the world I had made and
had still to make....

12

And mingled with these dreams of power and patriotic service there was
another series of a different quality and a different colour, like the
antagonistic colour of a shot silk. The white life and the red life,
contrasted and interchanged, passing swiftly at a turn from one to
another, and refusing ever to mingle peacefully one with the other. I
was asking myself openly and distinctly: what are you going to do
for the world? What are you going to do with yourself? and with an
increasing strength and persistence Nature in spite of my averted
attention was asking me in penetrating undertones: what are you going
to do about this other fundamental matter, the beauty of girls and women
and your desire for them?

I have told of my sisterless youth and the narrow circumstances of my
upbringing. It made all women-kind mysterious to me. If it had not been
for my Staffordshire cousins I do not think I should have known any
girls at all until I was twenty. Of Staffordshire I will tell a little
later. But I can remember still how through all those ripening years,
the thought of women's beauty, their magic presence in the world beside
me and the unknown, untried reactions of their intercourse, grew upon me
and grew, as a strange presence grows in a room when one is occupied by
other things. I busied myself and pretended to be wholly occupied, and
there the woman stood, full half of life neglected, and it seemed to my
averted mind sometimes that she was there clad and dignified and divine,
and sometimes Aphrodite shining and commanding, and sometimes that Venus
who stoops and allures.

This travel abroad seemed to have released a multitude of things in my
mind; the clear air, the beauty of the sunshine, the very blue of
the glaciers made me feel my body and quickened all those disregarded
dreams. I saw the sheathed beauty of women's forms all about me, in the
cheerful waitresses at the inns, in the pedestrians one encountered
in the tracks, in the chance fellow travellers at the hotel tables.
"Confound it!" said I, and talked all the more zealously of that greater
England that was calling us.

I remember that we passed two Germans, an old man and a tall fair girl,
father and daughter