her word, in spite of
all that retrospect with the search-light could not wholly spoil, she
attained at times to endorsing the working principle of the entire
withholder, as it had been once phrased by her--'One should quite
withdraw.' Retrospect, on the whole, made it out a principle more
honest, more kind.

Tommy, who was every day being shown a little more how Prudence Varley
had from the beginning 'quite withdrawn,' concerned himself, not with
the honesty or the kindness of the principle, but merely with its
immediate basis.

So, coming to an understanding of its basis, he saw vividly his own
hopelessly unachieved intimacy, his attempts so driven back upon
themselves, yet gaily denying defeat, his battering at walls which had
been built--not at all, as he had supposed, of abstraction, but of
entire perception. He saw now more and more each day the impenetrability
of those walls; retrospect illumined for him the unheeding detachment,
the abrupt swerves from persons to things, so frequent because he had
been so indomitable in his return to persons, perceiving them for gates
in the impenetrable walls.

There had been times, there had been moments, when the gates had
yielded a very little; one had, as it were, got sudden glimpses through.
After all, the Crevequers had never failed, till now, to achieve any
intimacy....

The half-conscious, vague knowledge of this made the shut gates the more
significant; their barred faces were written over, large, with words.
The Crevequers, having begun to learn to read, spelt them out.

Tommy's reading was perhaps attained to with greater slowness, greater
difficulty--the fault of sex--than Betty's; but in the end the
attainment was equally complete.

To Tommy one element in the business was all-important; before it the
other elements shrivelled into nothing. But there were other elements
which at times had their turn. There was the attitude of Venables, now
realized as the basis of the embarrassment which had for some time been
oddly, inexplicably, growing into their intercourse with each other.
Wholly to absorb that attitude Tommy had to go back some years, to an
old atmosphere--an atmosphere of discriminations between the things a
man could do and the other things which he could not do. It is curious
how environment can choke an atmosphere. This, of a certain social and
moral decency, as evolved by youth in community, had been brought back
to Tommy by Venables. Venables a