he white, quaint-lanterned lighthouses of the South Foreland.
There, in a kind of niche below the crest, we sat talking. It was a
spacious day, serenely blue and warm, and on the wrinkled water remotely
below a black tender and six hooded submarines came presently, and
engaged in mysterious manoeuvers. Shrieking gulls and chattering
jackdaws circled over us and below us, and dived and swooped; and a
skerry of weedy, fallen chalk appeared, and gradually disappeared again,
as the tide fell and rose.

We talked and thought that afternoon on every aspect of our relations.
It seems to me now we talked so wide and far that scarcely an issue in
the life between man and woman can arise that we did not at least touch
upon. Lying there at Isabel's feet, I have become for myself a symbol of
all this world-wide problem between duty and conscious, passionate love
the world has still to solve. Because it isn't solved; there's a wrong
in it either way.. .. The sky, the wide horizon, seemed to lift us out
of ourselves until we were something representative and general. She was
womanhood become articulate, talking to her lover.

"I ought," I said, "never to have loved you."

"It wasn't a thing planned," she said.

"I ought never to have let our talk slip to that, never to have turned
back from America."

"I'm glad we did it," she said. "Don't think I repent."

I looked at her.

"I will never repent," she said. "Never!" as though she clung to her
life in saying it.

I remember we talked for a long time of divorce. It seemed to us then,
and it seems to us still, that it ought to have been possible for
Margaret to divorce me, and for me to marry without the scandalous and
ugly publicity, the taint and ostracism that follow such a readjustment.
We went on to the whole perplexing riddle of marriage. We criticised
the current code, how muddled and conventionalised it had become, how
modified by subterfuges and concealments and new necessities, and the
increasing freedom of women. "It's all like Bromstead when the building
came," I said; for I had often talked to her of that early impression of
purpose dissolving again into chaotic forces. "There is no clear right
in the world any more. The world is Byzantine. The justest man to-day
must practise a tainted goodness."

These questions need discussion--a magnificent frankness of
discussion--if any standards are again to establish an effective hold
upon educated people. Discretions, as