Here is a difficulty that no bullying imposition of
arbitrary rules on the one hand nor any reckless abandonment of law on
the other, can solve. Humanity has yet to find its method in sexual
things; it has to discover the use and the limitation of jealousy. And
before it can even begin to attempt to find, it has to cease its present
timid secret groping in shame and darkness and turn on the light of
knowledge. None of us knows much and most of us do not even know what is
known.

Sec. 8

The house is very quiet to-day. It is your mother's birthday, and you
three children have gone with her and Mademoiselle Potin into the forest
to celebrate the occasion. Presently I shall join you. The sunlit
garden, with its tall dreaming lilies against the trellised vines upon
the wall, the cedars and the grassy space about the sundial, have that
distinguished stillness, that definite, palpable and almost outlined
emptiness which is so to speak your negative presence. It is like a
sheet of sunlit colored paper out of which your figures have been cut.
There is a commotion of birds in the jasmine, and your Barker reclines
with an infinite tranquillity, a masterless dog, upon the lawn. I take
up this writing again after an interval of some weeks. I have been in
Paris, attending the Sabotage Conference, and dealing with those
intricate puzzles of justice and discipline and the secret sources of
contentment that have to be solved if sabotage is ever to vanish from
labor struggles again. I think a few points have been made clearer in
that curious riddle of reconciliations....

Now I resume this story. I turn over the sheets that were written and
finished before my departure, and come to the notes for what is to
follow.

Perhaps my days of work in Paris have carried my mind on beyond the
point at which I left the narrative. I sit as it were among a pile of
memories that are now all disordered and mixed up together, their proper
sequences and connexions lost. I cannot trace the phases through which
our mutual passion rode up through the restrained and dignified
intentions of our friendship. But I know that presently we were in a
white heat of desire. There must have been passages that I now
altogether forget, moments of tense transition. I am more and more
convinced that our swiftest, intensest, mental changes leave far less
vivid memories than impressions one receives when one is comparatively
passive. And of this phase in my life of w