For some years I never deceived Margaret about any concrete fact
nor, except for the silence about my earlier life that she had
almost forced upon me, did I hide any concrete fact that seemed to
affect her, but from the outset I was guilty of immense spiritual
concealments, my very marriage was based, I see now, on a spiritual
subterfuge; I hid moods from her, pretended feelings. . . .



3


The interest and excitement of setting-up a house, of walking about
it from room to room and from floor to floor, or sitting at one's
own dinner table and watching one's wife control conversation with a
pretty, timid resolution, of taking a place among the secure and
free people of our world, passed almost insensibly into the interest
and excitement of my Parliamentary candidature for the Kinghamstead
Division, that shapeless chunk of agricultural midland between the
Great Western and the North Western railways. I was going to "take
hold" at last, the Kinghamstead Division was my appointed handle. I
was to find my place in the rather indistinctly sketched
constructions that were implicit in the minds of all our circle.
The precise place I had to fill and the precise functions I had to
discharge were not as yet very clear, but all that, we felt sure,
would become plain as things developed.

A few brief months of vague activities of "nursing" gave place to
the excitements of the contest that followed the return of Mr.