Hartley made a permanent metaphysical crisis of my life by refusing me for moral reasons. Did this lead me to make immorality my mask? Such pompous speculations are of course a kind of nonsense and I surprise myself by writing them down. What were Hartley’s ‘reasons’? I shall never know. It is possible that some demonic sense of a surrender of innocence entered into my affair with Clement, as if I were saying to Hartley: You did not trust me. Well, I will show you, now and forever after, how right you were! Perhaps all my love affairs have been vicious attempts to show Hartley that she was right after all. But she was only right because she left me. You die at heart from a withdrawal of love. My mother’s threats of such a withdrawal made me utterly vulnerable to Hartley’s crime. Hartley destroyed my innocence, she and the demon of jealousy. She made me faithless. But with her I would have been faithful, with her my whole life would have been different, less rootless, less empty. Do I then think my life has been empty, my life? A ridiculous judgment! Could Hartley really have thought the youth that I then was ‘a worldly man’? If so she was more like my mother than I ever suspected. She made me a worldly man by rejecting me, that failure ruined me morally. Did she think I would be ‘lost’ in the theatre? She never said that. It was her rejection that made me lose my way. Would I have been faithful? How could I not have been, if she had lived with me, sewed for me, cooked for me. We would have become one, and the holiness of marriage would have been our safety and our home forever. She was a part, an evidence, of some pure uncracked un-fissured confidence in the good which was never there for me again.