gs, or superiorities
and inferiorities; it is a catalogue of differences between two people
linked in a relationship that constantly becomes more intolerant of
differences.

This is how we stood to each other, and none of it was clear to either
of us at the outset. To begin with, I found myself reserving myself
from her, then slowly apprehending a jarring between our minds and
what seemed to me at first a queer little habit of misunderstanding in
her....

It did not hinder my being very fond of her....

Where our system of reservation became at once most usual and most
astounding was in our personal relations. It is not too much to say that
in that regard we never for a moment achieved sincerity with one another
during the first six years of our life together. It goes even deeper
than that, for in my effort to realise the ideal of my marriage I ceased
even to attempt to be sincere with myself. I would not admit my own
perceptions and interpretations. I tried to fit myself to her thinner
and finer determinations. There are people who will say with a note
of approval that I was learning to conquer myself. I record that much
without any note of approval....

For some years I never deceived Margaret about any concrete fact nor,
except for the silence about my earlier life that she had almost forced
upon me, did I hide any concrete fact that seemed to affect her, but
from the outset I was guilty of immense spiritual concealments, my very
marriage was based, I see now, on a spiritual subterfuge; I hid moods
from her, pretended feelings....

3

The interest and excitement of setting-up a house, of walking about
it from room to room and from floor to floor, or sitting at one's own
dinner table and watching one's wife control conversation with a pretty,
timid resolution, of taking a place among the secure and free people of
our world, passed almost insensibly into the interest and excitement
of my Parliamentary candidature for the Kinghamstead Division, that
shapeless chunk of agricultural midland between the Great Western and
the North Western railways. I was going to "take hold" at last, the
Kinghamstead Division was my appointed handle. I was to find my place in
the rather indistinctly sketched constructions that were implicit in the
minds of all our circle. The precise place I had to fill and the precise
functions I had to discharge were not as yet very clear, but all that,
we felt sure, would become plain as t