Social theory in its first crude
form of Democratic Socialism gripped my intelligence more and more
powerfully. I argued in the laboratory with the man who shared my bench
until we quarreled and did not speak and also I fell in love.
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.
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