shyly and before others, and I and my mother went off back across
the moonlit park--the bracken thickets rustling with startled deer--to
the railway station at Checkshill and so to our dingy basement in
Clayton, and I saw no more of Nettie--except that I saw her in my
thoughts--for nearly a year. But at our next meeting it was decided
that we must correspond, and this we did with much elaboration
of secrecy, for Nettie would have no one at home, not even her
only sister, know of her attachment. So I had to send my precious
documents sealed and under cover by way of a confidential schoolfellow
of hers who lived near London. . . . I could write that address
down now, though house and street and suburb have gone beyond any
man's tracing.

Our correspondence began our estrangement, because for the first
time we came into more than sensuous contact and our minds sought
expression.

Now you must understand that the world of thought in those days was
in the strangest condition, it was choked with obsolete inadequate
formulae, it was tortuous to a maze-like degree with secondary
contrivances and adaptations, suppressions, conventions, and
subterfuges. Base immediacies fouled the truth on every man's
lips. I was brought up by my mother in a quaint old-fashioned narrow
faith in certain religious formulae, certain rules of conduct,
certain conceptions of social and political order, that had no more
relevance to the realities and needs of everyday contemporary life
than if they were clean linen that had been put away with lavender
in a drawer. Indeed, her religion did actually smell of lavender;
on Sundays she put away all the things of reality, the garments and
even the furnishings of everyday, hid her hands, that were gnarled