times disconcertingly attractive, often bright and witty, but,

because of the vast reservations that hid them from me, wanting,

subtly and inevitably wanting, inunderstanding. My idealisation of

Margaret had evaporated insensibly after our marriage. The shrine I

had made for her in my privatethoughts stood at last undisguisedly

empty. But Isabel did not for a moment admit of either idealisation

or interested contempt. She opened a new sphere of womanhood to me.

With her steady amber-brown eyes, her unaffected interest in

impersonal things, her upstanding waistless blue body, her energy,

decision and courage, she seemed rather some new and infinitely

finerform of boyhood than a feminine creature, as I had come to

measure femininity. She was my perfect friend. Could I have

foreseen, had my world been morewisely planned, to this day we

might have been such friends.

She seemed at that time unconscious of sex, though she has told me

since how full she was of protesting curiosities and restrained

emotions. She spoke, as indeed she has always spoken, simply,

clearly, and vividly; schoolgirl slang mingled with words that

marked ample voracious reading, and she moved quickly with the free

directness of some graceful young animal. She took many of the easy

freedoms a man or a sister might have done with me. She wouldtouch

my arm, lay a hand on my shoulder as I sat, adjust the lapel of a

breast-pocket as she talked to me. She says now she loved me always

from the beginning. Idoubt if there was a suspicion of that in her

mind those days. I used to find her regarding me with the clearest,

steadiest gaze in the world, exactly like the gaze of some nice

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