I was twenty-six when I entered into possession of Woadley. By my grandfather’s will I inherited an annual income of seven thousand pounds. I was at an age when, for most men, everything of importance lies in the future and that which lies behind is of no consequence--in the nature of an experiment. I did not regard my past in that light. It was vital. Until the woman I loved should share my fortunes I felt the future to be an indefinite postponement. How she could come into my life again I dared not surmise; that she would come, I never doubted. I knew now that the letter which I had both hoped for and dreaded, would never arrive. For Dorrie’s sake they had decided to remain together. In my wiser moments I was glad of it; I knew that, had she chosen otherwise, our love would have been degraded. Strong influences were brought to bear to press me into public life. My situation and training entitled me to take up a position of some local importance. I might have stood for Parliament, but I shrank from publicity. All I asked was to be left alone to follow up my own interests in quiet. I had come so suddenly into a sphere of power which I had done nothing to merit, that ambitions which had still other ambitions for their goal, ceased to allure me. My temperament was natively bookish; by nature I was a Fellow of Lazarus and by compulsion a conscientious country squire. When I was not at Oxford, dreaming in libraries, I was at Woadley, superintending the practical management of my estate. The joy of sex and its fulfilment in a home, which apply the spur to most men’s activities, to me were denied; it was unthinkable that I should marry any woman other than Vi. The energies which should have found a domestic expression with me became the mental stimulus of an absorbing scholarly pursuit. Through my Oxford lectures and fugitive contributions to periodicals, I began to be known as an authority on the intellectual revolt of the Renaissance; by slow degrees I set about writing the life of that strange contradiction, half-libertine, half-saint, Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini. Engaged in these employments, I grew to love the smooth gray days of Woadley which stole by ghost-like and unnumbered. And I came to love the Woadley country with a passion which was as much due to its associations as to its beauty. When I had grown tired of researches into things ancient, one of my greatest joys was to plod to Ransby through rutted lanes deep in hedges, and so out to the north beach where the sea strummed against the land, and the wind raged, and the blackened hull of the wreck crouched beneath the weight of sky.