The ferment of sex had been creeping into my being like a slowly
advancing tide through all my Wimblehurst days, the stimulus of London
was like the rising of a wind out of the sea that brings the waves in
fast and high. Ewart had his share in that. More and more acutely and
unmistakably did my perception of beauty, form and sound, my desire
for adventure, my desire for intercourse, converge on this central and
commanding business of the individual life. I had to get me a mate.

I began to fall in love faintly with girls I passed in the street,
with women who sat before me in trains, with girl fellow-students,
with ladies in passing carriages, with loiterers at the corners, with
neat-handed waitresses in shops and tea-rooms, with pictures even
of girls and women. On my rare visits to the theatre I always became
exalted, and found the actresses and even the spectators about me
mysterious, attractive, creatures of deep interest and desire. I had
a stronger and stronger sense that among these glancing, passing
multitudes there was somewhere one who was for me. And in spite of every
antagonistic force in the world, there was something in my very marrow
that insisted: "Stop! Look at this one! Think of her! Won't she do?
This signifies--this before all things signifies! Stop! Why are you
hurrying by? This may be the predestined person--before all others."

It is odd that I can't remember when first I saw Marion, who became my
wife--whom I was to make wretched, who was to make me wretched, who
was to pluck that fine generalised possibility of love out of my early
manhood and make it a personal conflict. I became aware of her as one of
a number of interesting attractive figures that moved about in my world,
that glanced back at my eyes, that flitted by with a kind of averted
watchfulness. I would meet her coming through the Art Museum, which
was my short cut to the Brompton Road, or see her sitting, reading as I