In my memory that walk through the park before I came upon Nettie stands out very vividly.  The long tramp before it is foreshortened to a mere effect of dusty road and painful boot, but the bracken valley and sudden tumult of doubts and unwonted expectations that came to me, stands out now as something significant, as something unforgettable, something essential to the meaning of all that followed.  Where should I meet her?  What would she say?  I had asked these questions before and found an answer.  Now they came again with a trail of fresh implications and I had no answer for them at all.  As I approached Nettie she ceased to be the mere butt of my egotistical self-projection, the custodian of my sexual pride, and drew together and became over and above this a personality of her own, a personality and a mystery, a sphinx I had evaded only to meet again.

I find a little difficulty in describing the quality of the old-world love-making so that it may be understandable now.

We young people had practically no preparation at all for the stir and emotions of adolescence.  Towards the young the world maintained a conspiracy of stimulating silences.  There came no initiation.  There were books, stories of a curiously conventional kind that insisted on certain qualities in every love affair and greatly intensified one’s natural desire for them, perfect trust, perfect loyalty, lifelong devotion.  Much of the complex essentials of love were altogether hidden.  One read these things, got accidental glimpses of this and that, wondered and forgot, and so one grew.  Then strange emotions, novel alarming desires, dreams strangely charged with feeling; an inexplicable impulse of self-abandonment began to tickle queerly amongst the familiar purely egotistical and materialistic things of boyhood and girlhood.  We were like misguided travelers who had camped in the dry bed of a tropical river.  Presently we were knee deep and neck deep in the flood.  Our beings were suddenly going out from ourselves seeking other beings—­we knew not why.  This novel craving for abandonment to some one of the other sex, bore us away.  We were ashamed and full of desire.  We kept the thing a guilty secret, and were resolved to satisfy it against all the world.  In this state it was we drifted in the most accidental way against some other blindly seeking creature, and linked like nascent atoms.

We were obsessed by the books we read, by all the talk about us that once we had linked ourselves we were linked for life.  Then afterwards we discovered that other was also an egotism, a thing of ideas and impulses, that failed to correspond with ours.

So it was, I say, with the young of my class and most of the young people in our world.  So it came about that I sought Nettie on the Sunday afternoon and suddenly came upon her, light bodied, slenderly feminine, hazel eyed, with her soft sweet young face under the shady brim of her hat of straw, the pretty Venus I had resolved should be wholly and exclusively mine.