When he met White in Johannesburg
during the strike period of 1913, he was on his way to see her in
London and to settle their relationship upon a new and more definite
footing. It was her suggestion that they should meet.
About her he felt an enormous, inexorable, dissatisfaction. He
could not persuade himself that his treatment of her and that his
relations to her squared with any of his preconceptions of nobility,
and yet at no precise point could he detect where he had definitely
taken an ignoble step. Through Amanda he was coming to the full
experience of life. Like all of us he had been prepared, he had
prepared himself, to take life in a certain way, and life had taken
him, as it takes all of us, in an entirely different and unexpected
way. . . . He had been ready for noble deeds and villainies, for
achievements and failures, and here as the dominant fact of his
personal life was a perplexing riddle. He could not hate and
condemn her for ten minutes at a time without a flow of exoneration;
he could not think of her tolerantly or lovingly without immediate
shame and resentment, and with the utmost will in the world he could
not banish her from his mind.
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