_The Passionate Friends_ (1913) is another experiment in exposition. The very real and fine love of Stafford (the autobiographer in this case) and Lady Mary Christian is spoiled, made to appear insignificant and debased, by all the conventions and petty, unoriginal judgments that go to the making of the rule of our society. The woman had to make her choice between love in an undignified poverty for which all her training had unfitted her, and a sterile ease and magnificence that gave her those opportunities which her temperament and education demanded. She chose for dignity and opportunity, was tempted to grasp at love, and thus finally came into a blind alley from which death was the only escape. It is another picture of the old conflict illustrated in the persons of Ann Veronica and Marjorie Trafford; the constant inability that our conditions impose on the desire to love beautifully. The implicit demand is that for greater freedom for women, socially and economically. Incidentally we see that the man, Stafford, does not suffer in the same degree. His splendid love for Lady Mary is thwarted, but he finds an outlet. It is a new aspect of escape, by the way, for Stafford's illuminating business of spreading and collating knowledge is a relief from the scientific research which was in some form or another the specific of the earlier novels--if we exclude Remington's political propaganda in _The New Machiavelli_, a suggested solution that was, at the best, something half-hearted. And Stafford's escape, and his version of going to the mountain apart--by way of a sight of the East and of America--bring us back to that integral theme which I have so insisted upon, even at the risk of tedious repetition. "I was already beginning to see the great problem of mankind," writes Stafford, "as indeed nothing other than a magnification of the little problem of myself, as a problem in escape from grooves, from preoccupations and suspicions, precautions and ancient angers.... For all of us, as for each of us, salvation is that. We have to get away from ourselves to a greater thing, to a giant's desire and an unending life, ours and yet not our own."