One fragment began in the air.  “Of course I had made myself responsible for her life.  But it was, you see, such a confoundedly energetic life, as vigorous and as slippery as an eel. . . .  Only by giving all my strength to her could I have held Amanda. . . .  So what was the good of trying to hold Amanda? . . .

“All one’s people have this sort of claim upon one.  Claims made by their pride and their self-respect, and their weaknesses and dependences.  You’ve no right to hurt them, to kick about and demand freedom when it means snapping and tearing the silly suffering tendrils they have wrapped about you.  The true aristocrat I think will have enough grasp, enough steadiness, to be kind and right to every human being and still do the work that ought to be his essential life.  I see that now.  It’s one of the things this last year or so of loneliness has made me realize; that in so far as I have set out to live the aristocratic life I have failed.  Instead I’ve discovered it—­and found myself out.  I’m an overstrung man.  I go harshly and continuously for one idea.  I live as I ride.  I blunder through my fences, I take off too soon.  I’ve no natural ease of mind or conduct or body.  I am straining to keep hold of a thing too big for me and do a thing beyond my ability.  Only after Prothero’s death was it possible for me to realize the prig I have always been, first as regards him and then as regards Amanda and my mother and every one.  A necessary unavoidable priggishness. . . .”  I do not see how certain things can be done without prigs, people, that is to say, so concentrated and specialized in interest as to be a trifle inhuman, so resolved as to be rather rhetorical and forced. . . .  All things must begin with clumsiness, there is no assurance about pioneers. . . .

“Some one has to talk about aristocracy, some one has to explain aristocracy. . . .  But the very essence of aristocracy, as I conceive it, is that it does not explain nor talk about itself. . . .

“After all it doesn’t matter what I am. . . .  It’s just a private vexation that I haven’t got where I meant to get.  That does not affect the truth I have to tell. . . .

“If one has to speak the truth with the voice of a prig, still one must speak the truth.  I have worked out some very considerable things in my research, and the time has come when I must set them out clearly and plainly.  That is my job anyhow.  My journey to London to release Amanda will be just the end of my adolescence and the beginning of my real life.  It will release me from my last entanglement with the fellow creatures I have always failed to make happy. . . .  It’s a detail in the work. . . .  And I shall go on.

“But I shall feel very like a man who goes back for a surgical operation.

“It’s very like that.  A surgical operation, and when it is over perhaps I shall think no more about it.

“And beyond these things there are great masses of work to be done.  So far I have but cleared up for myself a project and outline of living.  I must begin upon these masses now, I must do what I can upon the details, and, presently, I shall see more clearly where other men are working to the same ends. . . .”