uneasy association with the Baileys and the professedly constructive
Young Liberals. To get that ordered life I had realised the need of
organisation, knowledge, expertness, a wide movement of co-ordinated
methods. On the individual side I thought that a life of urgent
industry, temperance, and close attention was indicated by my
perception of these ends. I married Margaret and set to work. But
something in my mind refused from the outset to accept these
determinations as final. There was always a doubt lurking below,
always a faint resentment, a protesting criticism, a feeling of
vitally important omissions.

I arrived at last at the clear realisation that my political
associates, and I in my association with them, were oddly narrow,
priggish, and unreal, that the Socialists with whom we were
attempting co-operation were preposterously irrelevant to their own
theories, that my political life didn't in some way comprehend more
than itself, that rather perplexingly I was missing the thing I was
seeking. Britten's footnotes to Altiora's self-assertions, her fits
of energetic planning, her quarrels and rallies and vanities, his
illuminating attacks on Cramptonism and the heavy-spirited
triviality of such Liberalism as the Children's Charter, served to
point my way to my present conclusions. I had been trying to deal
all along with human progress as something immediate in life,
something to be immediately attacked by political parties and groups
pointing primarily to that end. I now began to see that just as in
my own being there was the rather shallow, rather vulgar, self-
seeking careerist, who wore an admirable silk hat and bustled self-
consciously through the lobby, and a much greater and indefinitely
growing unpublished personality behind him--my hinterland, I have
called it--so in human affairs generally the permanent reality is