.. We have wasted four days in that hot close place. When we
found that League of Social Service we were talking about," he said
with a determined eye upon me, "chastity will be first among the virtues
prescribed."

"I shall form a rival league," I said a little damped. "I'm hanged if I
give up a single desire in me until I know why."

He lifted his chin and stared before him through his glasses at nothing.
"There are some things," he said, "that a man who means to work--to do
great public services--MUST turn his back upon. I'm not discussing the
rights or wrongs of this sort of thing. It happens to be the conditions
we work under. It will probably always be so. If you want to experiment
in that way, if you want even to discuss it,--out you go from political
life. You must know that's so.... You're a strange man, Remington, with
a kind of kink in you. You've a sort of force. You might happen to do
immense things.... Only--"

He stopped. He had said all that he had forced himself to say.

"I mean to take myself as I am," I said. "I'm going to get experience
for humanity out of all my talents--and bury nothing."

Willersley twisted his face to its humorous expression. "I doubt if
sexual proclivities," he said drily, "come within the scope of the
parable."

I let that go for a little while. Then I broke out. "Sex!" said I, "is
a fundamental thing in life. We went through all this at Trinity. I'm
going to look at it, experience it, think about it--and get it square
with the rest of life. Career and Politics must take their chances of
that. It's part of the general English slackness that they won't look
this in the face. Gods! what a muffled time we're coming out of! Sex
means breeding, and breeding is a necessary function in a nation.
The Romans broke up upon that. The Americans fade out amidst their
successes. Eugenics--"

"THAT wasn't Eugenics," said Willersley.

"It was a woman," I said after a little interval, feeling oddly that
I had failed altogether to answer him, and yet had a strong dumb case
against him.

BOOK THE SECOND: MARGARET

CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE

1

I must go back a little way with my story. In the previous book I
have described the kind of education that happens to a man of my class
nowadays, and it has been convenient to leap a phase in my experience
that I must now set out at length. I want to tell in this second
hook how I came to marry, and to do th