"Good God!" I put it to myself, "that I should finish the work those
Cossacks had begun! I who want order and justice before everything!
There's no way out of it, no decent excuse! If I didn't think, I
ought to have thought!" . . .

"How did I get to it?" . . . I would ransack the phases of my
development from the first shy unveiling of a hidden wonder to the
last extremity as a man will go through muddled account books to
find some disorganising error. . . .

I was also involved at that time--I find it hard to place these
things in the exact order of their dates because they were so
disconnected with the regular progress of my work and life--in an
intrigue, a clumsy, sensuous, pretentious, artificially stimulated
intrigue, with a Mrs. Larrimer, a woman living separated from her
husband. I will not go into particulars of that episode, nor how we
quarrelled and chafed one another. She was at once unfaithful and
jealous and full of whims about our meetings; she was careless of
our secret, and vulgarised our relationship by intolerable
interpretations; except for some glowing moments of gratification,
except for the recurrent and essentially vicious desire that drew us
back to each other again, we both fretted at a vexatious and
unexpectedly binding intimacy. The interim was full of the quality
of work delayed, of time and energy wasted, of insecure precautions
against scandal and exposure. Disappointment is almost inherent in
illicit love. I had, and perhaps it was part of her recurrent
irritation also, a feeling as though one had followed something fine
and beautiful into a net--into bird lime! These furtive scuffles,
this sneaking into shabby houses of assignation, was what we had
made out of the suggestion of pagan beauty; this was the reality of