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.
To go to our inner office in Raggett Street I had to walk through a room
in which the typists worked. They were the correspondence typists; our
books and invoicing had long since overflowed into the premises we had
had the luck to secure on either side of us. I was, I must confess,
always in a faintly cloudily-emotional way aware of that collection of
for the most part round-shouldered femininity, but presently one of
the girls detached herself from the others and got a real hold upon
my attention.
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