civilisation permits him to do so, is the most impossible thing in
the world. We deal here with facts that are kept secret and
obscure, but I doubt for my own part if more than one man out of
five in our class satisfies that ideal demand. The rest are even as
I was, and Hatherleigh and Esmeer and all the men I knew. I draw no
lessons and offer no panacea; I have to tell the quality of life,
and this is how it is. This is how it will remain until men and
women have the courage to face the facts of life.

I was no systematic libertine, you must understand; things happened
to me and desire drove me. Any young man would have served for that
Locarno adventure, and after that what had been a mystic and
wonderful thing passed rapidly into a gross, manifestly misdirected
and complicating one. I can count a meagre tale of five illicit
loves in the days of my youth, to include that first experience, and
of them all only two were sustained relationships. Besides these
five "affairs," on one or two occasions I dipped so low as the inky
dismal sensuality of the streets, and made one of those pairs of
correlated figures, the woman in her squalid finery sailing
homeward, the man modestly aloof and behind, that every night in the
London year flit by the score of thousands across the sight of the
observant. . . .

How ugly it is to recall; ugly and shameful now without
qualification! Yet at the time there was surely something not
altogether ugly in it--something that has vanished, some fine thing
mortally ailing.

One such occasion I recall as if it were a vision deep down in a
pit, as if it had happened in another state of existence to someone