d half betrayed itself. There followed a tragi-comedy
of hesitations and disunited struggle. Within four months the crisis of
our two lives was past....

It is not within my purpose to tell you, my son, of the particular
events, the particular comings and goings, the chance words, the chance
meetings, the fatal momentary misunderstandings that occurred between
us. I want to tell of something more general than that. This
misadventure is in our strain. It is our inheritance. It is a
possibility in the inheritance of all honest and emotional men and
women. There are no doubt people altogether cynical and adventurous to
whom these passions and desires are at once controllable and permissible
indulgences without any radiation of consequences, a secret and
detachable part of life, and there may be people of convictions so
strong and simple that these disturbances are eliminated, but we
Strattons are of a quality neither so low nor so high, we stoop and
rise, we are not convinced about our standards, and for many
generations to come, with us and with such people as the Christians, and
indeed with most of our sort of people, we shall be equally desirous of
free and intimate friendship and prone to blaze into passion and
disaster at that proximity.

This is one of the essential riddles in the adaptation of such human
beings as ourselves to that greater civilized state of which I dream. It
is the gist of my story. It is one of the two essential riddles that
confront our kind. The servitude of sex and the servitude of labor are
the twin conditions upon which human society rests to-day, the two
limitations upon its progress towards a greater social order, to that
greater community, those uplands of light and happy freedom, towards
which that Being who was my father yesterday, who thinks in myself
to-day, and who will be you to-morrow and your sons after you, by his
very nature urges and must continue to urge the life of mankind. The
story of myself and Mary is a mere incident in that gigantic, scarce
conscious effort to get clear of toils and confusions and encumbrances,
and have our way with life. We are like little figures, dots ascendant
upon a vast hillside; I take up our intimacy for an instant and hold it
under a lens for you. I become more than myself then, and Mary stands
for innumerable women. It happened yesterday, and it is just a part of
that same history that made Edmond Stratton of the Hays elope with
Charlotte Anst