It was just the most inappropriate time for that disclosure.The long smouldering antagonism to my endowment of motherhood ideas had flared up into an active campaign in the EXPURGATOR, and it would be altogether disastrous to us if I should be convicted of any personal irregularity.It was just because of the manifest and challenging respectability of my position that I had been able to carry the thing as far as I had done.Now suddenly my fortunes had sprung a leak, and scandal was pouring in....It chanced, too, that a wave of moral intolerance was sweeping through London, one of those waves in which the bitterness of the consciously just finds an ally in the panic of the undiscovered.A certain Father Blodgett had been preaching against social corruption with extraordinary force, and had roused the Church of England people to a kind of competition in denunciation.The old methods of the Anti-Socialist campaign had been renewed, and had offered far too wide a scope and too tempting an opportunity for private animosity, to be restricted to the private affairs of the Socialists.I had intimations of an extensive circulation of "private and confidential" letters....
I think there can be nothing else in life quite like the unnerving realisation that rumour and scandal are afoot about one.Abruptly one's confidence in the solidity of the universe disappears.One walks silenced through a world that one feels to be full of inaudible accusations.One cannot challenge the assault, get it out into the open, separate truth and falsehood.It slinks from you, turns aside its face.Old acquaintances suddenly evaded me, made extraordinary excuses; men who had presumed on the verge of my world and pestered me with an intrusive enterprise, now took the bold step of flat repudiation.I became doubtful about the return of a nod, retracted all those tentacles of easy civility that I had hitherto spread to the world.I still grow warm with amazed indignation when I recall that Edward Crampton, meeting me full on the steps of the Climax Club, cut me dead."By God!" I cried, and came near catching him by the throat and wringing out of him what of all good deeds and bad, could hearten him, a younger man than I and empty beyond comparison, to dare to play the judge to me.And then I had an open slight from Mrs.Millingham, whom I had counted on as one counts upon the sunrise.I had not expected things of that sort; they were disconcerting beyond measure; it was as if the world were giving way beneath my feet, as though something failed in the essential confidence of life, as though a hand of wet ice had touched my heart.Similar things were happening to Isabel.Yet we went on working, visiting, meeting, trying to ignore this gathering of implacable forces against us.
For a time I was perplexed beyond measure to account for this campaign.Then I got a clue.The centre of diffusion was the Bailey household.The Baileys had never forgiven me my abandonment of the young Liberal group they had done so much to inspire and organise; their dinner-table had long been a scene of hostile depreciation of the BLUE WEEKLY and all its allies; week after week Altiora proclaimed that I was "doing nothing," and found other causes for our bye-election triumphs; I counted Chambers Street a dangerous place for me.Yet, nevertheless, I was astonished to find them using a private scandal against me.They did.I think Handitch had filled up the measure of their bitterness, for I had not only abandoned them, but I was succeeding beyond even their power of misrepresentation.Always I had been a wasp in their spider's web, difficult to claim as a tool, uncritical, antagonistic.I admired their work and devotion enormously, but Ihad never concealed my contempt for a certain childish vanity they displayed, and for the frequent puerility of their political intrigues.I suppose contempt galls more than injuries, and anyhow they had me now.They had me.Bailey, I found, was warning fathers of girls against me as a "reckless libertine," and Altiora, flushed, roguish, and dishevelled, was sitting on her fender curb after dinner, and pledging little parties of five or six women at a time with infinite gusto not to let the matter go further.Our cell was open to the world, and a bleak, distressful daylight streaming in.
I had a gleam of a more intimate motive in Altiora from the reports that came to me.Isabel had been doing a series of five or six articles in the POLITICAL REVIEW in support of our campaign, the POLITICAL REVIEW which had hitherto been loyally Baileyite.Quite her best writing up to the present, at any rate, is in those papers, and no doubt Altiora had had not only to read her in those invaded columns, but listen to her praises in the mouths of the tactless influential.Altiora, like so many people who rely on gesture and vocal insistence in conversation, writes a poor and slovenly prose and handles an argument badly; Isabel has her University training behind her and wrote from the first with the stark power of a clear-headed man."Now we know," said Altiora, with just a gleam of malice showing through her brightness, "now we know who helps with the writing!"She revealed astonishing knowledge.
