curtain over it to accentuate its libellous offence.


CHAPTER THE FOURTH

MARION I

As I look back on those days in which we built up the great Tono-Bungay
property out of human hope and credit for bottles and rent and printing,
I see my life as it were arranged in two parallel columns of unequal
width, a wider, more diffused, eventful and various one which
continually broadens out, the business side of my life, and a narrow,
darker and darkling one shot ever and again with a gleam of happiness,
my home-life with Marion. For, of course, I married Marion.

I didn't, as a matter of fact, marry her until a year after Tono-Bungay
was thoroughly afloat, and then only after conflicts and discussions
of a quite strenuous sort. By that time I was twenty-four. It seems
the next thing to childhood now. We were both in certain directions
unusually ignorant and simple; we were temperamentally antagonistic, and
we hadn't--I don't think we were capable of--an idea in common. She was
young and extraordinarily conventional--she seemed never to have an
idea of her own but always the idea of her class--and I was young and
sceptical, enterprising and passionate; the two links that held us
together were the intense appeal her physical beauty had for me, and her
appreciation of her importance in my thoughts. There can be no doubt of
my passion for her. In her I had discovered woman desired. The nights I
have lain awake on account of her, writhing, biting my wrists in a fever
of longing! ...