at I must give something of the
atmosphere in which I first met my wife and some intimations of the
forces that went to her making. I met her in Staffordshire while I was
staying with that uncle of whom I have already spoken, the uncle who
sold my father's houses and settled my mother in Penge. Margaret was
twenty then and I was twenty-two.

It was just before the walking tour in Switzerland that opened up
so much of the world to me. I saw her once, for an afternoon, and
circumstances so threw her up in relief that I formed a very vivid
memory of her. She was in the sharpest contrast with the industrial
world about her; she impressed me as a dainty blue flower might do,
come upon suddenly on a clinker heap. She remained in my mind at once a
perplexing interrogation and a symbol....

But first I must tell of my Staffordshire cousins and the world that
served as a foil for her.

2

I first went to stay with my cousins when I was an awkward youth of
sixteen, wearing deep mourning for my mother. My uncle wanted to talk
things over with me, he said, and if he could, to persuade me to go into
business instead of going up to Cambridge.

I remember that visit on account of all sorts of novel things, but
chiefly, I think, because it was the first time I encountered anything
that deserves to be spoken of as wealth. For the first time in my life
I had to do with people who seemed to have endless supplies of money,
unlimited good clothes, numerous servants; whose daily life was made
up of things that I had hitherto considered to be treats or exceptional
extravagances. My cousins of eighteen and nineteen took cabs, for
instance, with the utmost freedom, and travelled first-class in the
local trains that run up and down the district of the Five Towns with an
entire unconsciousness of the magnificence, as it seemed to me, of such
a proceeding.

The family occupied a large villa in Newcastle, with big lawns before
it and behind, a shrubbery with quite a lot of shrubs, a coach house
and stable, and subordinate dwelling-places for the gardener and the
coachman. Every bedroom contained a gas heater and a canopied brass
bedstead, and had a little bathroom attached equipped with the porcelain
baths and fittings my uncle manufactured, bright and sanitary and
stamped with his name, and the house was furnished throughout with
chairs and tables in bright shining wood, soft and prevalently
red Turkish carpets, cosy corners, curtain