mind on the way
vanished at the sight of her.

"I want to talk to you," I answered lamely.

For some seconds neither of us said a word.

"I want to tell you things about my life," I began.

She answered with a scarcely audible "yes."

"I almost asked you to marry me at Pangbourne," I plunged. "I didn't. I
didn't because--because you had too much to give me."

"Too much!" she echoed, "to give you!" She had lifted her eyes to my
face and the colour was coming into her cheeks.

"Don't misunderstand me," I said hastily. "I want to tell you things,
things you don't know. Don't answer me. I want to tell you."

She stood before the fireplace with her ultimate answer shining through
the quiet of her face. "Go on," she said, very softly. It was so
pitilessly manifest she was resolved to idealise the situation whatever
I might say. I began walking up and down the room between those
cyclamens and the cabinet. There were little gold fishermen on the
cabinet fishing from little islands that each had a pagoda and a tree,
and there were also men in boats or something, I couldn't determine
what, and some obscure sub-office in my mind concerned itself with that
quite intently. Yet I seem to have been striving with all my being
to get words for the truth of things. "You see," I emerged, "you make
everything possible to me. You can give me help and sympathy, support,
understanding. You know my political ambitions. You know all that I
might do in the world. I do so intensely want to do constructive things,
big things perhaps, in this wild jumble.... Only you don't know a bit
what I am. I want to tell you what I am. I'm complex.... I'm streaked."

I glanced at her, and she was regarding me with an expression of
blissful disregard for any meaning I was seeking to convey.

"You see," I said, "I'm a bad man."

She sounded a note of valiant incredulity.

Everything seemed to be slipping away from me. I pushed on to the ugly
facts that remained over from the wreck of my interpretation. "What
has held me back," I said, "is the thought that you could not possibly
understand certain things in my life. Men are not pure as women are. I
have had love affairs. I mean I have had affairs. Passion--desire. You
see, I have had a mistress, I have been entangled--"

She seemed about to speak, but I interrupted. "I'm not telling you," I
said, "what I meant to tell you. I want you to know clearly that there
is another side to my life, a dirty si