of the severer virtues. And we talked politics and books and ideas
and Bernard Shaw (who was a department by himself and supposed in
those days to be ethically sound at bottom), and mingled with the
intellectuals--I myself was, as it were, a promoted intellectual.

The Cramptons had a tendency to read good things aloud on their less
frequented receptions, but I have never been able to participate
submissively in this hyper-digestion of written matter, and
generally managed to provoke a disruptive debate. We were all very
earnest to make the most of ourselves and to be and do, and I wonder
still at times, with an unassuaged perplexity, how it is that in
that phase of utmost earnestness I have always seemed to myself to
be most remote from reality.



2


I look back now across the detaching intervention of sixteen crowded
years, critically and I fancy almost impartially, to those
beginnings of my married life. I try to recall something near to
their proper order the developing phases of relationship. I am
struck most of all by the immense unpremeditated, generous-spirited
insincerities upon which Margaret and I were building.

It seems to me that here I have to tell perhaps the commonest
experience of all among married educated people, the deliberate,
shy, complex effort to fill the yawning gaps in temperament as they
appear, the sustained, failing attempt to bridge abysses, level