But my friend and his great trouble turn my mind from these
questions of locomotion and the freedoms that cluster about them. In
spite of myself I find myself framing his case. He is a lover, the
most conventional of Anglican lovers, with a heart that has had its
training, I should think, in the clean but limited schoolroom of
Mrs. Henry Wood....

In Utopia I think they will fly with stronger pinions, it will not
be in the superficialities of life merely that movement will be wide
and free, they will mount higher and swoop more steeply than he in
his cage can believe. What will their range be, their prohibitions?
what jars to our preconceptions will he and I receive here?

My mind flows with the free, thin flow that it has at the end of an
eventful day, and as we walk along in silence towards our inn I rove
from issue to issue, I find myself ranging amidst the fundamental
things of the individual life and all the perplexity of desires and
passions. I turn my questionings to the most difficult of all sets
of compromises, those mitigations of spontaneous freedom that
constitute the marriage laws, the mystery of balancing justice
against the good of the future, amidst these violent and elusive
passions. Where falls the balance of freedoms here? I pass for a
time from Utopianising altogether, to ask the question that, after
all, Schopenhauer failed completely to answer, why sometimes in the
case of hurtful, pointless, and destructive things we want so
vehemently....

I come back from this unavailing glance into the deeps to the
general question of freedoms in this new relation. I find myself far
adrift from the case of the Frognal botanist, and asking how far a