I have told how I got myself a silk hat and black coat to please her
on Sunday--to the derision of some of my fellow-students who charged to
meet me, and how we became engaged. But that was only the beginning
of our difference. To her that meant the beginning of a not unpleasant
little secrecy, an occasional use of verbal endearments, perhaps even
kisses. It was something to go on indefinitely, interfering in no way
with her gossiping spells of work at Smithie's. To me it was a pledge
to come together into the utmost intimacy of soul and body so soon as we
could contrive it....

I don't know if it will strike the reader that I am setting out to
discuss the queer, unwise love relationship and my bungle of a marriage
with excessive solemnity. But to me it seems to reach out to vastly
wider issues than our little personal affair. I've thought over my life.
In these last few years I've tried to get at least a little wisdom out
of it. And in particular I've thought over this part of my life. I'm
enormously impressed by the ignorant, unguided way in which we two
entangled ourselves with each other. It seems to me the queerest thing
in all this network of misunderstandings and misstatements and faulty
and ramshackle conventions which makes up our social order as the
individual meets it, that we should have come together so accidentally
and so blindly. Because we were no more than samples of the common fate.
Love is not only the cardinal fact in the individual life, but the most
important concern of the community; after all, the way in which the
young people of this generation pair off determines the fate of the
nation; all the other affairs of the State are subsidiary to that.
And we leave it to flushed and blundering youth to stumble on its own
significance, with nothing to guide in but shocked looks and sentimental
twaddle and base whisperings and cant-smeared examples.