she was
telling me--just as one tells something too strange for comment or
emotion--how her father had been shot and her sister outraged and
murdered before her eyes.

It was as if one had dipped into something primordial and stupendous
beneath the smooth and trivial surfaces of life. There was I, you know,
the promising young don from Cambridge, who wrote quite brilliantly
about politics and might presently get into Parliament, with my collar
and tie in my hand, and a certain sense of shameful adventure fading out
of my mind.

"Ach Gott!" she sighed by way of comment, and mused deeply for a
moment before she turned her face to me, as to something forgotten and
remembered, and assumed the half-hearted meretricious smile.

"Bin ich eine hubsche?" she asked like one who repeats a lesson.

I was moved to crave her pardon and come away.

"Bin ich eine hubsche?" she asked a little anxiously, laying a detaining
hand upon me, and evidently not understanding a word of what I was
striving to say.

8

I find it extraordinarily difficult to recall the phases by which
I passed from my first admiration of Margaret's earnestness and
unconscious daintiness to an intimate acquaintance. The earlier
encounters stand out clear and hard, but then the impressions become
crowded and mingle not only with each other but with all the subsequent
developments of relationship, the enormous evolutions of interpretation
and comprehension between husband and wife. Dipping into my memories is
like dipping into a ragbag, one brings out this memory or that, with no
intimation of how they came in time or what led to them and joined them
together. And they are all mixed up with subsequent associations,
with sympathies and discords, habits of intercourse, surprises and
disappointments and discovered misunderstandings. I know only that
always my feelings for Margaret were complicated feelings, woven of many
and various strands.

It is one of the curious neglected aspects of life how at the same time
and in relation to the same reality we can have in our minds streams of
thought at quite different levels. We can be at the same time idealising
a person and seeing and criticising that person quite coldly and
clearly, and we slip unconsciously from level to level and produce
all sorts of inconsistent acts. In a sense I had no illusions about
Margaret; in a sense my conception of Margaret was entirely poetic
illusion. I don't think I was ever bl