Indeed, for five years I had lived without women altogether--almost without casual intercourse of any kind. From month to month I saw my parents. From hour to hour I dwelt within my work: finding it a realm so various that no mood of my waking and no dream of my sleep were quite outside it. The delights of leisure are those of wandering and surprise and repetition. In my work I had them. Easy love and comradeship bring ecstasy, because in their otherness we lose ourselves, with passion or with service. My work possessed these qualities as well. I was as full in its embrace as any woman in a happy love. And beyond all fulfillment, I had the joy of tempering my desire. My work was indeed limitless: I looked on my good mood as limitless, also. _b_ That mood is behind me in this April dusk, as I walk through the city streets to dine with my parents. Behind me, in the sense of a wide illusion hiding the sun of reality like mist, and by the sun wiped out. I have still my work: I enter still this inexhaustible day of discovery and thought. But I have found a woman whom I love! And in my love for her, I understand the years of continence and solitude: they were preparation for this love; they were the articulate presentiment that I would love indeed; they were a threshold, in passionate void, for this great filling passion. I have been repelled by the unchastity of women ... now it is clear! ... because I looked and longed for a woman who was chaste. I refer not to prostitutes. Indeed, a low chastity is at times the one quality they possess. Prostitutes did not repel, they bored me: they are impersonal, domesticated creatures, like certain dogs in whom the individual will has been displaced by the alien will of man. Their one offering ... relaxation ... I had not aged enough to welcome. No: it was women of my own world whom I found unchaste. And now I understand, thinking of Mildred, by what previsioned measure I had mysteriously judged them. ... The girls toward whom I was drawn by a clear physical desire and whose response, that should have been as limpid, was confused by fear of the Morrow and the Moral. The married women whose lush fields invited pleasaunce, and whose unchastity was still more complex. For in them, the passional was entered and deformed by the possessive; a chaos of morals, poesy and economics weeded their warm beauty. I was attracted, when at all, to sensuous women. And sensuousness that is not sheer becomes a tepid water: weak idealizing, smug and slavish exaltation of the ego muddies it. Such had been my conclusions, measured, though I knew it not, by the revelation that I was awaiting.