even at my coarsest--was I moved by physical desire alone. Was I
seeking help and fellowship? Was I seeking some intimacy with
beauty? It was a thing too formless to state, that I seemed always
desiring to attain and never attaining. Waves of gross sensuousness
arose out of this preoccupation, carried me to a crisis of
gratification or disappointment that was clearly not the needed
thing; they passed and left my mind free again for a time to get on
with the permanent pursuits of my life. And then presently this
solicitude would have me again, an irrelevance as it seemed, and yet
a constantly recurring demand.

I don't want particularly to dwell upon things that are disagreeable
for others to read, but I cannot leave them out of my story and get
the right proportions of the forces I am balancing. I was no
abnormal man, and that world of order we desire to make must be
built of such stuff as I was and am and can beget. You cannot have
a world of Baileys; it would end in one orderly generation.
Humanity is begotten in Desire, lives by Desire.


"Love which is lust, is the Lamp in the Tomb;
Love which is lust, is the Call from the Gloom."


I echo Henley.

I suppose the life of celibacy which the active, well-fed, well-
exercised and imaginatively stirred young man of the educated
classes is supposed to lead from the age of nineteen or twenty, when
Nature certainly meant him to marry, to thirty or more, when