overtook unwary women. I doubt indeed a little if children would have
saved us; we should have differed so fatally about their upbringing.

Altogether, I remember my life with Marion as a long distress, now hard,
now tender. It was in those days that I first became critical of my life
and burdened with a sense of error and maladjustment. I would lie
awake in the night, asking myself the purpose of things, reviewing my
unsatisfying, ungainly home-life, my days spent in rascal enterprise
and rubbish-selling, contrasting all I was being and doing with my
adolescent ambitions, my Wimblehurst dreams. My circumstances had an
air of finality, and I asked myself in vain why I had forced myself into
them.

VI

The end of our intolerable situation came suddenly and unexpectedly, but
in a way that I suppose was almost inevitable.

My alienated affections wandered, and I was unfaithful to Marion.

I won't pretend to extenuate the quality of my conduct. I was a young
and fairly vigorous male; all my appetite for love had been roused
and whetted and none of it had been satisfied by my love affair and my
marriage. I had pursued an elusive gleam of beauty to the disregard of
all else, and it had failed me. It had faded when I had hoped it would
grow brighter. I despaired of life and was embittered. And things
happened as I am telling. I don't draw any moral at all in the matter,
and as for social remedies, I leave them to the social reformer. I've
got to a time of life when the only theories that interest me are
generalisations about realities.