hat was liked by hostesses. And the other
side of my nature that first flared through the cover of restraints at
Locarno, that too had had opportunity to develop along the line London
renders practicable. I had had my experiences and secrets and adventures
among that fringe of ill-mated or erratic or discredited women the
London world possesses. The thing had long ago ceased to be a matter of
magic or mystery, and had become a question of appetites and excitement,
and among other things the excitement of not being found out.

I write rather doubtfully of my growing during this period. Indeed I
find it hard to judge whether I can say that I grew at all in any real
sense of the word, between three and twenty and twenty-seven. It seems
to me now to have been rather a phase of realisation and clarification.
All the broad lines of my thought were laid down, I am sure, by the date
of my Locarno adventure, but in those five years I discussed things over
and over again with myself and others, filled out with concrete fact
forms I had at first apprehended sketchily and conversationally,
measured my powers against my ideals and the forces in the world about
me. It was evident that many men no better than myself and with no
greater advantages than mine had raised themselves to influential and
even decisive positions in the worlds of politics and thought. I was
gathering the confidence and knowledge necessary to attack the world in
the large manner; I found I could write, and that people would let
me write if I chose, as one having authority and not as the scribes.
Socially and politically and intellectually I knew myself for an honest
man, and that quite without any deliberation on my part this showed
and made things easy for me. People trusted my good faith from the
beginning--for all that I came from nowhere and had no better position
than any adventurer.

But the growth process was arrested, I was nothing bigger at
twenty-seven than at twenty-two, however much saner and stronger, and
any one looking closely into my mind during that period might well have
imagined growth finished altogether. It is particularly evident to me
now that I came no nearer to any understanding of women during that
time. That Locarno affair was infinitely more to me than I had supposed.
It ended something--nipped something in the bud perhaps--took me at a
stride from a vague, fine, ignorant, closed world of emotion to intrigue
and a perfectly definite