and limited sensuality. It ended my youth, and
for a time it prevented my manhood. I had never yet even peeped at the
sweetest, profoundest thing in the world, the heart and meaning of a
girl, or dreamt with any quality of reality of a wife or any such thing
as a friend among womanhood. My vague anticipation of such things in
life had vanished altogether. I turned away from their possibility. It
seemed to me I knew what had to be known about womankind. I wanted to
work hard, to get on to a position in which I could develop and forward
my constructive projects. Women, I thought, had nothing to do with that.
It seemed clear I could not marry for some years; I was attractive to
certain types of women, I had vanity enough to give me an agreeable
confidence in love-making, and I went about seeking a convenient
mistress quite deliberately, some one who should serve my purpose and
say in the end, like that kindly first mistress of mine, "I've done you
no harm," and so release me. It seemed the only wise way of disposing
of urgencies that might otherwise entangle and wreck the career I was
intent upon.

I don't apologise for, or defend my mental and moral phases. So it was
I appraised life and prepared to take it, and so it is a thousand
ambitious men see it to-day....

For the rest these five years were a period of definition. My political
conceptions were perfectly plain and honest. I had one constant desire
ruling my thoughts. I meant to leave England and the empire better
ordered than I found it, to organise and discipline, to build up a
constructive and controlling State out of my world's confusions. We
had, I saw, to suffuse education with public intention, to develop a new
better-living generation with a collectivist habit of thought, to link
now chaotic activities in every human affair, and particularly to catch
that escaped, world-making, world-ruining, dangerous thing, industrial
and financial enterprise, and bring it back to the service of the
general good. I had then the precise image that still serves me as a
symbol for all I wish to bring about, the image of an engineer building
a lock in a swelling torrent--with water pressure as his only source of
power. My thoughts and acts were habitually turned to that enterprise;
it gave shape and direction to all my life. The problem that most
engaged my mind during those years was the practical and personal
problem of just where to apply myself to serve this almost innate