Illyrian Spring

One must learn what one was like, and then be what one ought, independently of the opinion of other people, whether good or il

but freedom, gnädige Frau, is within. It does not live in Dalmatia any more than in London.’ He spread out his hand again like a diagram, and tapped it with his

What is freedom? It consists in two things: To know each his own limitations and to accept them – that is the same thing as to know oneself, and to accept oneself as one is, without fear, or envy, or distaste; and to recognise and accept the conditions under which one lives, also without fear or envy or distaste. When you do this, you shall be free.’

most lovely sense of assurance, of certainty – in this one relationship spontaneous, in all others hard to come by, the fruit of cultivation and intention; a sense of assurance on which youth rests, supported; the safe base, paradoxically enough, from which it launches its merry and irresponsible onslaughts on authority and the tiresomeness of age. Something o

I will love them and believe in them, whatever they are and whatever they do, because they are mine’ – that, unconscious but unescapable, is the attitude of parents. And whether mistakenly ex

youth that experience was necessary and valuable, but no one had ever told her what to do with it; it was something which you apparently acquired in large or small packets, like Lux, and then put away in a cupboard. Experience so treated does indeed leave a sort of sediment of knowledge – the mere possession of those stored packets may give a certain confidence; but it does not make a very vivid contribution to life, and intellectually Grace Kilmichael and Nicholas Humphries were not so far apart as one might have supposed.

His mind was interesting, a more interesting mind than Teddy’s; perhaps as interesting as Nigel’s, because it was more experimental. But how odd to realise that he was actually older than they! One thought of him instinctively as years younger. And in a curious flash of insight it struck her that his childishness seemed almost deliberate; as though because of some failure of courage, of realisation, he clung to it. He was – yes, dependent was the word.

There is a distinct tendency among Englishwomen of a very normal type rather to shy away from the emotion of love when directed towards themselves, unless they happen to have fallen in love on their own account first. Once married, to shy becomes a duty as well as, so to speak, a pleasure; it is what society expects of them. Only, curiously enough, an exception is ordinarily made in favour of the devotions of young men to older married women: these are regarded as an arrangement socially sound, formative to the young man and innocuous to the married woman, who has other fish – a husband and a family – to fry. The frying of the family is supposed to keep her out of harm’s way. On the whole this view is a sane one; and Grace, aware of it, though she might be surprised, did not feel called upon to be shocked by Nicholas’s state, accustomed as she was to regulate her life and even her thoughts by conventional standards. But the married woman,

But by praising her for the things she did well, dressing her becomingly, repeating nice things said about her, and pointing out where she had gained morally or conspicuously done right, her mother had built up, as it were, in the child that moderate degree of self-approval without which no human being can face the world adequately. It seemed a strange cruelty that no sooner was the edifice complete than Linnet should turn round and start to shatter the same fabric in her mother.

Married women so often become more an institution than a person – to their own families a wife or a mother, to other people the wife or the mother of somebody else. Apart from her painting, Grace Kilmichael had been an institution for years. She didn’t mind it; she hadn’t really noticed it; but when Nicholas Humphries started treating her as a person, being interested in her as herself, ‘Lady K.’, and not