loved as the
birthplace of all possible adventure, seemed to me now without
spaciousness or distinction. The trees and hedges cramped the little
fields and broke their rhythm. No great winds ever swept them clean.
The landscape was confused: there was no adventure in it, suggestion
least of all. Everything had already happened there.

And on my way home, resentful perhaps yet eager still, I did a
dreadful thing. Possibly I hoped still for that divine sensation
which refused to come. I visited the very field, the very poplar ...
I found the scene quite unchanged, but found it also--lifeless. The
glamour of association did not operate. I knew no poignancy, desire
lay inert. The thrill held stubbornly aloof. No link was
strengthened.... I came home slowly, thinking instead of my mother's
plans and wishes for me, and of the clear intention to incorporate me
in the stolid and conventional formulas of what appeared to me as
uninspired English dullness. My disappointment crystallized into
something like revolt. A faint hostility even rose in me as we sat
together, talking of politics, of the London news just come to hand,
of the neighbours, of the weather too. I was conscious of opposition
to her stereotyped plans, and of resentment towards the lack of
understanding in her. I would shake free and follow beauty. The
yearning, for want of sympathy, and the hunger, for lack of
sustenance, grew very strong and urgent in me.

I longed passionately just then for beauty--and for that revelation of
it which included somewhere the personal emotion of a strangely eager
love.

VIII

THIS, then, was somewhat my state of mind, when, after our late tea on
the verandah, I strolled out on to the lawn to enjoy my pipe in the
quiet of the garden paths. I felt dissatisfied and disappointed, yet
knew not entirely perhaps, the reason. I wished to be alone, but was
hungry for companionship as well. Mother saw me go and watched
attentively, but said no word, merely following me a moment with her
eyes above the edge of the Times she read, as of old, during the hours
between tea and dinner. The Spectator, her worldly Bible, lay ready to
her hand when the Times should have been finished. They were,
respectively, as always, her dictionary of opinion, and her
medicine-chest. Before I had gone a dozen yards, her head disappeared
behind the printed sheet again. The roses flowed between us.

I felt her following glance, as I felt also its with