s important, because other people go
into politics, because they can get titles and a sense of influence
and--other things. And then there are quarrels, old grudges to serve."

"These are roughnesses of the surface."

"Old Stephen!" she cried with the note of a mother. "They will worry you
in politics."

I laughed. "Perhaps I'm not altogether so simple."

"Oh! you'll get through. You have a way of going on. But I shall have
to watch over you. I see I shall have to watch over you. Tell me of the
things you mean to do. Where are you standing?"

I began to tell her a little disjointedly of the probabilities of my
Yorkshire constituency....

Sec. 6

I have a vivid vignette in my memory of my return to my father's house,
down through the pine woods and by the winding path across the deep
valley that separated our two ridges. I was thinking of Mary and nothing
but Mary in all the world and of the friendly sweetness of her eyes and
the clean strong sharpness of her voice. That sweet white figure of
Rachel that had been creeping to an ascendancy in my imagination was
moonlight to her sunrise. I knew it was Mary I loved and had always
loved. I wanted passionately to be as she desired, the friend she
demanded, that intimate brother and confederate, but all my heart cried
out for her, cried out for her altogether.

I would be her friend, I repeated to myself, I would be her friend. I
would talk to her often, plan with her, work with her. I could put my
meanings into her life and she should throw her beauty over mine. I
began already to dream of the talk of to-morrow's meeting....

Sec. 7

And now let me go on to tell at once the thing that changed life for
both of us altogether, that turned us out of the courses that seemed
set for us, our spacious, successful and divergent ways, she to the
tragedy of her death and I from all the prospects of the public career
that lay before me to the work that now, toilsomely, inadequately and
blunderingly enough, I do. It was to pierce and slash away the
appearances of life for me, it was to open my way to infinite
disillusionment, and unsuspected truths. Within a few weeks of our
second meeting Mary and I were passionately in love with one another; we
had indeed become lovers. The arrested attractions of our former love
released again, drew us inevitably to that. We tried to seem outwardly
only friends, with this hot glow between us. Our tormented secret was
half discovered an