My sense of her deficiencies didn't stand in the way of my falling
at last very deeply in love with her. Her very shortcomings seemed
to offer me something. . . .

She stood in my mind for goodness--and for things from which it
seemed to me my hold was slipping.

She seemed to promise a way of escape from the deepening opposition
in me between physical passions and the constructive career, the
career of wide aims and human service, upon which I had embarked.
All the time that I was seeing her as a beautiful, fragile, rather
ineffective girl, I was also seeing her just as consciously as a
shining slender figure, a radiant reconciliation, coming into my
darkling disorders of lust and impulse. I could understand clearly
that she was incapable of the most necessary subtleties of political
thought, and yet I could contemplate praying to her and putting all
the intricate troubles of my life at her feet.

Before the reappearance of Margaret in my world at all an unwonted
disgust with the consequences and quality of my passions had arisen
in my mind. Among other things that moment with the Lettish girl
haunted me persistently. I would see myself again and again sitting
amidst those sluttish surroundings, collar and tie in hand, while
her heavy German words grouped themselves to a slowly apprehended
meaning. I would feel again with a fresh stab of remorse, that this
was not a flash of adventure, this was not seeing life in any
permissible sense, but a dip into tragedy, dishonour, hideous
degradation, and the pitiless cruelty of a world as yet uncontrolled
by any ordered will.