ruther and get himself run through the body at Haddington
two hundred years ago, which drove the Laidlaw-Christians to Virginia in
'45, gave Stratton Street to the moneylenders when George IV. was
Regent, and broke the heart of Margaret Stratton in the days when
Charles the First was king. With our individual variations and under
changed conditions the old desires and impulses stirred us, the old
antagonisms confronted us, the old difficulties and sloughs and
impassable places baffled us. There are times when I think of my history
among all those widespread repeated histories, until it seems to me that
the human Lover is like a creature who struggles for ever through a
thicket without an end....

There are no universal laws of affection and desire, but it is
manifestly true that for the most of us free talk, intimate association,
and any real fellowship between men and women turns with an extreme
readiness to love. And that being so it follows that under existing
conditions the unrestricted meeting and companionship of men and women
in society is a monstrous sham, a merely dangerous pretence of
encounters. The safe reality beneath those liberal appearances is that a
woman must be content with the easy friendship of other women and of one
man only, letting a superficial friendship towards all other men veil
impassable abysses of separation, and a man must in the same way have
one sole woman intimate. To all other women he must be a little blind, a
little deaf, politely inattentive. He must respect the transparent,
intangible, tacit purdah about them, respect it but never allude to it.
To me that is an intolerable state of affairs, but it is reality. If you
live in the spirit of any other understanding you will court social
disaster. I suppose it is a particularly intolerable state of affairs to
us Strattons because it is in our nature to want things to seem what
they are. That translucent yet impassible purdah outrages our veracity.
And it is plain to me that our social order cannot stand and is not
standing the tensions it creates. The convention that passions and
emotions are absent when they are palpably present broke down between
Mary and myself, as it breaks down in a thousand other cases, as it
breaks down everywhere. Our social life is honeycombed and rotten with
secret hidden relationships. The rigid, the obtuse and the
unscrupulously cunning escape; the honest passion sooner or later flares
out and destroys....